Friday Face-Off: Heart
Welcome to The Friday Face-Off, a weekly meme created by Books by Proxy! Each Friday, we will pit cover against cover while also taking the opportunity to showcase gorgeous artwork and feature some of our favorite book covers. If you want to join the fun, simply choose a book each Friday that fits that week’s predetermined theme, post and compare two or more different covers available for that book, then name your favorite. A list of future weeks’ themes are available at Lynn’s Book Blog.
This week’s theme is:
“Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady”
~ a cover featuring a HEART
Mogsy’s Pick:
Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
I wanted to challenge myself this week by choosing something that’s unexpected, and this was a book I read a while ago which I haven’t thought about for a long time, but only came back to me recently as I was scouring through my shelves trying to come up with ideas for this topic. At its heart (haha), Warm Bodies is a “zombie book”, but it’s also definitely not your typical post-apocalyptic survivalist horror story involving gory encounters with the savage, brain-eating hordes. On the surface, the zombies here appear to of the usual shambling, moaning and in various-stages-of-decay variety, but dig deeper and you will find that they are able to maintain a semblance of a structured society. Communication between them is just good enough to allow things like organized hunts or a rudimentary class system, and zombie couples even have wedding ceremonies and are given zombie children to teach and raise.
The book also gives a plausible reason as to why zombies like eating human brains, explaining that it gives them a cerebral high while letting them relive the memories and experience the emotions of their victims. It is in this way that R, our zombie protagonist and narrator, becomes fixated with Julia, a girl he encounters on a routine hunt after killing her boyfriend and chowing down on his grey matter. And the rest, as they say, is history. “Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady” indeed.
And now, time to look at the covers:
First row, from left to right: Random House Vintage UK (2011) – Atria (2011) – Spanish Edition (2011)
German Edition (2013) – Vintage (2013) – Turkish Edition (2011) – Italian Edition (2011)
Winner:
I’m not in love with any of these, to be honest. But since I dislike the movie-edition covers, that helps narrows down my choice of winner. I’m going to have to go with the Spanish edition, which was also the cover that inspired me to use this book for today’s topic in the first place. It drew my eye, not to mention the fact that it brings to light the not-so-hidden “Romeo & Juliet” allusion.
What do you think? Which one is your favorite?
The BiblioSanctum 
I think my fave is the Random House UK one. Then the German and probably the Atria edition after that.
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Yeah, the German one isn’t that bad for a movie edition 🙂
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Mine will always be the 2nd one up at the top (with him & his ridiculous the waving in the wind lol) but I think that’s because that’s the edition I saw first & the one I own. I may be biased!
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Tie**
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Is that what it is, a tie? I always look at that cover and have no idea! I just wonder why he has it! And you’re right, it’s pretty funny! 😀
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I think it’s supposed to be??? I’m actually not sure but I think so cuz in the book he has one (at least in the beginning lol)
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I think we have the german edition in French
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Yeah, I think that one might be all over Europe, same cover but just different language.
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Awesome picks! I actually chose the second cover for the Random House version since it looks so haunting, but I like your pick too!
Here’s my Friday Face-Off:
https://rabbitearsblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/29/the-friday-face-off-5-heart/
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I think it’s very atmospheric too! And I have to wonder if that red tie/scarf thing is symbolic in some way.
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Yeah!
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Funny – before I got to the part with your winner, I was thinking, “I don’t like any of these.” However, if I had to pick one, I think I like the Atria one the best with the Spanish one coming in closely behind. It always amazes me to see so many different covers.
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Yeah, I don’t *love* any of the choices this week, but I do prefer the simple and elegant covers 🙂
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I think you picked the best one. I’m not usually a fan of movie tie in covers either😀
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Yeah, very rarely do I prefer them, I can only think of a couple exceptions!
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The simplicity – or maybe starkness – of the first cover (Random House) is the one I find more appealing. 🙂
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That’s a nice one too!
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I say the Atria one 😀
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That one has a flair for drama for sure 🙂
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The first cover Random House Vintage UK cover is the one that I picked up (I honestly only picked the book up because of the cover and then was delighted with what it turned out to be), but my favourite is probably the Atria cover which manages to be gorgeous and foreboding all at the same time.
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It’s amazing how dramatically different the two covers are, isn’t it 😀
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What an interesting premise! I haven’t encountered this book before – though that’s not really a surprise as I’m not a horror fan. I happen to like the one where he’s stumbling around on the road with all sorts of red waves emanating from his head. It sounds as it this would be the one that most closely matches the content – though I would like a lot less writing on the cover…
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It’s an interesting zombie novel for sure! It’s definitely in the horror genre, but I guess there’s some romance in it as well…though just not in the conventional sense 😉
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lol… it certainly doesn’t sound like your run-of-the mill romance:)
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I’m not really a fan of any of the covers either! I did read the book a while back and wasn’t a big fan. I guess I prefer my zombies more to George Romero! I’m such a traditionalist!
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I can see that! I love how authors these days are coming up with all different takes on zombies, but there’s just something special about the classic Romero style zombies 🙂
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I like your choice and the Random House cover too. I’ve not read this one – I had a copy on my shelves for ages but it just never seemed to grab me for some reason (perhaps because it had the movie tie-in cover!)
Lynn 😀
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Haha, that might be it! Speaking of which, I saw the movie when it was on TV a few years ago and it was…not great 😛
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