Top Ten Tuesday #427

Hi everyone! I hope you’ve all had a good week since I last did one of these, mine was much quieter than the week before which was good, I definitely needed the break after such a busy week! I did go to the bimonthly conversation night at Battersea Spanish on Friday and that was really nice. This week is a similarly fairly quiet week but I am going to see Groundhog Day at the Old Vic with my mum tomorrow night, which should hopefully be really fun, I’ve heard nothing but good things (though this is continuing my trend of going to see musicals based on 90s movies that I’ve not yet seen because I’ve not seen this one either! In all fairness both Mrs Doubtfire and this came out before I was born!).

Anyway, today is Tuesday so it’s time for another Top Ten Tuesday, courtesy of Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week in honour of the 4th of July in the US, we’re talking Red, White and Blue Covers. Now obviously we don’t celebrate this holiday in the UK, but thankfully our flag has the same colours, so no need for me to change the topic. We have done this one once before, but thankfully Red, White and Blue are fairly popular colours for covers so I was able to find ten more books from my “Read” shelf on Goodreads with these colours. As I did before, I will note before I start that these covers will not necessarily have all three colours together on them but they will have at least one:

1. Children of Blood and Bone-Tomi Adeyemi

I could have done either of the covers from the first two books in this trilogy as the first has red and white and the second has blue and white! However I went for the first cover because it’s my favourite of the two, I love all the little details and I’ve always thought that black, red and white is a great and striking colour combination for covers (honestly if my country’s flag was black, red and white I’d be absolutely home free on this topic and could find loads of covers with all three, as evidenced by the fact that I did a red, white and black cover topic last year, but this one still has red and white on it, so it still counts! Coincidentally, this book was also on that list.).

2. Romanov-Nadine Brandes

I love this cover so much, ever time I look at it, it always reminds me of Christmas! This is another one I’m including for the red and white details (and another one that was on my red, white and black covers list), the white detailing is maybe a bit more subtle because it’s definitely the red and gold but it is still there and I think the white detailing on the typography makes the other colours stand out even more. This is honestly one of my favourite covers from the last few years, I love how intricate it is.

3. The Silvered Serpents-Roshani Chokshi

Maybe this year for Christmas, I could do a book covers with Christmassy vibes list because I definitely think I could find quite a few and pretty much all of them have absolutely nothing to do with Christmas but their covers just scream it anyway! This cover actually does have all three colours on it, the red and white are immediately obvious, since the main background of the cover is snow and the title is in red type but if you look closely a couple of the turrets of the ice palace are blue. This is one of my absolute all time favourite covers, I think it captures the wintery Russian setting of the book so well, and I love how intricate it is, with the beautiful swirled gate design, the leaves that kind of look like tinsel and the little icicles hanging off the gate as well as the whole cover looking like it’s kind of been captured in the middle of a snowstorm. The covers for all the books in this serious are gorgeous but this is without a doubt my favourite.

4. King of Fools-Amanda Foody

I used the first book in this series, Ace of Shades, the last time we did this topic, so it felt only right to use the second (and my personal favourite book of the series) this time around to represent the blue and white colours. I love how cleverly thought out the designs for this series are, you have the dice (as casinos play a big part in this series, particularly this book), the little club and spade designs (card games are a reoccurring theme throughout the series) and the shadow of the crown to represent the King of Fools (Levi) which again has symbols from card suits (here clubs and spades). This series just has such an instantly recognisable look and I think the designers for this series did a great job!

5. Enchantee-Gita Trelease

This one also has all three colours of red, white and blue on it, though I may be cheating slightly here because the red, white and blue on this cover is of course to represent the colours of France where this book is set, but hey, France and the UK have the same colours in their flag, so for the purposes of this topic, it still works! I absolutely love how much detail is crammed into this cover, Gita Trelease actually did a great Instagram post talking about all the little details so if you want a bit more detail then I recommend checking out her Instagram but some of my own personal favourite little details: I love the little card suit symbols integrated into the Gates of Versailles as card games and gambling play a big role in the story. I love the little rondels which represent Camille’s two different lives as an orphan in Paris and her fake life as the Baroness she transforms herself into to go to Versailles. I especially love the hot air balloon at the top as that plays an unexpected part in the story. Honestly the whole thing is just fabulous and really captures the vibes of the book.

6. Countless-Karen Gregory

Another one that has all three colours on it, as we have red and blue teardrops and the cover itself is white. It’s a really bright and striking cover, which does somewhat contrast to the story actually inside the book as it is quite dark but it does kind of work quite well as I think it strikes the same balance between sadness and hope that the story itself does.

7. Descendant of The Crane-Joan He

This is another one that actually has all three colours, you have the blue background and then the red and white on the crane and the flowers. I really love this cover, I think it’s so beautiful and really captures the Chinese inspired fantasy setting and I was sadly disappointed that I did not love the book as much as I loved the beautiful cover.

8. Spin The Dawn-Elizabeth Lim

Another blue and white cover. I picked this one up because the cover was so striking, the colours work really well together and I love that you can instantly tell from the cover that tailoring is a big part of this since you have Maia wielding the scissors and the golden thread and the piece of fabric she’s holding. Sadly, I did not find this story as engaging as the cover suggested, it’s another one that ended up being a kind of lacklustre story where I was burned by the pretty cover.

9. The Invisible Life Of Addie LaRue-VE Schwab

I had to get a VE Schwab cover in here somewhere of course! She is generally known for the distinctive red, white and black colour scheme but I wanted to share Addie LaRue’s cover here, because it is something a little different for her but still just as beautiful. The edition I have which is the Waterstones Exclusive Edition is the cover I’ve shown here which I do prefer as it has a black background instead of a blue and I think the little blue flowers and the white typography stand out a bit more against the black than they do against the blue background of the regular edition. I love that the flowers are forget-me-nots as well, such a lovely little detail. I also like that although the British edition doesn’t have the constellation pattern like the US edition, you still get a nod to Addie’s distinctive freckles with the seven dots spaced throughout the cover.

10. Night Spinner-Addie Thorley

The details on this one are just everything! I love the bird at the bottom which I think is meant to be Enebish’s bird Orbai (I can’t remember what kind of bird she is now, I think some kind of bird of prey, maybe an eagle or a hawk), I love the blend of colours going from a kind of purple, to dark blue, to lighter blue and whilst I’m not usually a fan of faces on covers, I think the silhouette of Enebish works really well here. The colours really embody both the night and the arctic tundra setting of the book which I love, it’s just a really gorgeous cover and I love the contrast between the dark blues of this cover to the golds of the sequel.

So there we go, those are some more red, white and blue covers for you, I was quite pleased I managed to get a good mix of red and white, blue and white and covers with all three (however subtly!). Have you read any of these books? What are your favourite covers with red, white or blue in them, or a combination of all three? Let me know in the comments!

Next week’s topic is a freebie, and I thought since Speak Now (Taylor’s version) comes out on Friday, it would be super fun to do a Speak Now freebie and match books to songs from the album (just the original songs though, not the from the vault songs as I won’t have listened to them enough to be able to match properly!). Think kind of like the Spotify book tag I did earlier in the year, except it will be just Speak Now songs!