Friday Face-Off: An Aerial Encounter
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:
~ a cover featuring AN AERIAL ENCOUNTER
Mogsy’s Pick:
Skyward by Brandon Sanderson
Skyward by Brandon Sanderson, a book that is all about aerial encounters. In Spensa’s world, everyone has heard of the heroic achievements of the Defiant Defense Force in the Battle of Alta—the battle in which forty pilots protected their planet Detritus from the alien Krell attack. Except in Spensa’s case, her father was known as the pilot who ran, shot down in disgrace for trying to abandon the fight. Now Spensa lives with the stain of that disgrace, but being a pilot has always been her greatest desire. Despite efforts to keep her out, she manages to make it into Flight School, more determined than ever to be come a full-fledged pilot for the DDF even with the deck stacked against her.
Given the story and its themes, I’m actually surprised there aren’t more covers for this book featuring aerial encounters, but I did find some. Let’s take a look at this week’s competition:
From left to right:
Delacrote Press (2018) – Gollancz (2018)
Polish Edition (2019) – Bulgarian Edition (2019) – Turkish Edition (2020)
Italian Edition (2019) – Russian Edition (2020)
German Edition (2021) – French Edition (2020) – Estonian Edition (2020)
Winner
I’ve always love the cover to the UK (Gollancz) edition of this book, and while there were a bunch of new ones here I hadn’t seen before, nothing quite came close to unseating it.
But what do you think? Which one is your favorite?
The BiblioSanctum 
Ooh that Gollancz cover is killer- love it!!!!
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It’s beautiful!
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Even though I don’t know the whole story, I think that your choice is the one that best reflects the sense of wonder and adventure that must be at its roots 🙂
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I do think that one “speaks” more than any of the other ones 🙂
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Oh yes – that’s THE cover for me, too. It’s not only a fabulous cover – it so accurately reflects the story. I love this series – the second book is every bit as good and I’m eagerly awaiting the next slice of the adventure!
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Hey, I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you see this – I think your blog’s been eating up my comments! I don’t think any of my comments for the last week have shown up, I was wondering if maybe they went into spam?
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Thank you for letting me know, Mogsy! Yes – I’ve just checked my Spam folder and that’s where they were! How annoying! I recently had a major update and some glitch always surfaces afterwards… Apologies for that and I’ll now keep an eye out:)).
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No worries, it happens! I just didn’t want you to think I’d stopped interacting with you on your blog though, I always visit whenever you have a new post and chime in whenever I can 🙂
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I know you do:))). And what with everything going right now – Life is pretty crazy outside the blog, unfortunately – I wouldn’t have necessarily gone in and investigated. So I was very pleased to get your message so I could go in and fix it!
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Oh yes, definitely agree with your choice this week – such a great cover, and in fact more covers than I expected given how relatively new this one is.
Lynn 😀
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Yeah, that scene just makes you feel humbled!
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Yup, I agree, that Gollancz cover is amazing. Another in a long line of series I’d really like to try. 🙂
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I’m really enjoying this series, it’s just a shame he’s working on so many that the next book will be a while, until it’s up on his “rotation” again – but good thing I follow almost all his series 😛
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I love the first two, its a toss up for me!
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They’re both beautiful, but I just love the majesty of the Gollancz cover!
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I like the second one, with the bolt coming out of the sky.
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Yes, its fantastic imagery is why it’s my favorite too!
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I like the one you went with here out of all of them, I think it’s the most interesting. 🙂
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Yes, artistically and stylistically it’s the most interesting to me as well!
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I got the first cover for my wife as it was the only one available here in the Netherlands at the time, close to her birthday. I do like Golancz’s cover as well as that version is the same size as most of the Sanderson books she has on her shelf.
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Ah yeah, Gollancz’s Sanderson editions all have this consistent look to them! I always thought that was a great marketing tactic 😀
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Same, some good contenders but there is always something missing
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Yep, nothing unseats the Gollancz!
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I prefer the Gollancz cover too. Just really like the cover and graphic look of it.
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Same! I love the style 😀
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