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This month, like last month and most months before it, I’ve used my professional bookshop book club to schedule time to read a writer that I’ve personally wanted to read for a while - what’s the point in working for yourself if you’re not going to use it to your advantage at every possible opportunity?! Helen Oyeyemi is a writer I’ve meant to read time and time again, but all the other millions of books just kept getting in my way. For October, I like to pick something overtly dark. If not now, when? So I whittled my way down to White is for Witching for our book club this month, consciously selected because the subject is a haunted house and the title says Witch (very Octoberish), and subsconsciously because the cover is by Jon Klassen.
An aside; Do you know how many books I've bought because the cover was designed by Jon Klassen ? All of them. That guy could design the label for a pack of blank paper and it would just sat B L A N K P A P E R in his special Klassenesque font and I'd be like ok, Jon Klassen, if you insist! I’ve bought novels and chapter books by Kenneth Oppel, Sara Pennypacker, Maryrose Wood, Allan Wolf, Amy Timberlake and Kelly Barnhill just because the cover was Klassen. Here I am, just judging books by their covers all the live-long-day. Honestly, it seems like a really good way to judge a book.
So yes, the cover of White is for Witching helped me make the choice, and endears me on the entry, but as it is not illustrated throughout, I think that’s the limit of JK’s sway. So the question is - did the book live up to its cover?
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