Friday Face-Off: Couples

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:

“Thus with a kiss I die”
~ a cover featuring a COUPLE

Mogsy’s Pick:
Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray

Naturally, for this week’s theme I turned to YA, since there’s never a shortage of covers featuring lovers in this genre. Defy the Stars was also narrowly going to be my Friday Face-Off choice a few weeks ago when we did the topic “Purple” before I decided to go with another title, so I’m glad this book got a second chance to be in the spotlight. The story follows Noemi Vidal, a seventeen year old soldier for her planet, Genesis. Ever since her people split from Earth many generations ago, the two sides have been fighting. However, Earth has a powerful weapon on their side: Burton Mansfield, a scientist and cybernetics genius who designs androids, or mechs, for the purposes of war. In the face of this tireless army, it’s only a matter of time before Genesis is overwhelmed and destroyed.

Meanwhile though, on a battled-damaged and abandoned ship called the Daedalus, a mech named Abel has been living alone for the last thirty years, yearning to be reunited with his creator. As the most advanced mech the galaxy has ever seen, he is Burton Mansfield’s greatest and most perfect creation, though in the eyes of Genesis, he is an abomination. For the past three decades, Abel’s programming has been learning and evolving, becoming more human. Then one day, Earth launches a surprise attack on Genesis’ ships, leading a Noemi to chance upon the Daedalus and Abel in her desperate attempt to escape, and thus begins a tale of forbidden love and fast-paced adventure among the stars.

Let’s take a look at the covers:

First row, left to right: Little Brown Books for Young Readers (2017) – Hot Key Books (2017)
Second row, left to right: Spanish (2017) – French (2017) – German (2017)

Winner:

I’m going to have to go with the Hot Key Books edition, since I love the interesting negative space and the lovely shades of purple used in this design. There’s also a fierce kind of intimacy captured between the two models gazing at each other in this image, which really caught my attention and made this cover stand apart from the others.

But what do you think? Which one is your favorite?