I won a mystery box of 4 novels. Imagine my joy and excitement. Four novels! I was over the moon.
And then I opened the mystery box. Whoever the insane bastard is who put it together must never be allowed around books. Or people.
The mystery box contained four novels, all set during WWII and all featuring on their covers a woman standing with her back to the reader. Four female backsides during WWII. Is there a weirdo who would want to read four books in a row that are identical on subject and cover art?
I haven’t had a similar book-related letdown in years. I hate WWII novels ever since we were veritably persecuted with WWII content in the USSR. Plus, I’ve read five trillion novels about the Spanish Civil War. I’m so over war novels.
Clarissa's Blog 
Let me guess, at least one of the books is by Kate Quinn.
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Yep. Is it on purpose that they all have women’s backsides on the cover? Is the cover art AI generated?
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I checked the Rose Code and there is a name of the designer of the cover listed, so it doesn’t look like it’s AI. They’ve been doing this for a few years now. Maybe the publishers think it adds to the “mystery” when you don’t see a woman’s face. There’s been so many of these generic WWII women’s mysteries, they ran out of faces to draw. 🙂 For some unfathomable reason this theme is very popular among a certain segment of the reading public, so they’ve been generating them by the bucketful. I cannot stand them. It started when I tried to read the hugely popular The Nightingale and was surprised by how poorly it was written. The main characters, French women in 1940s, spoke and behaved like the contemporary American women, but many liked it. But then they also liked The Gentleman in Moscow. That tells you all you need to know about the educational level of the average American reader.
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The part where the cover has a designer rather than an artist…
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“on purpose that they all have women’s backsides on the cover?”
I was curious and did a quick google image search of the author and Polish editions at least don’t feature the woman’s backside, they all have faces.
Still, I’d rather drink vinegar laced with straight pins than read one….
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“Maybe the publishers think it adds to the “mystery” when you don’t see a woman’s face”
More likely they don’t show a face so that it’s easier for female readers to imagine themselves as the heroine.
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I have looked into the popular novels in the genre, and they are mostly all female backsides. Not just these four. One author seems to have every cover dedicated to backsides. It’s extraordinary.
I have encountered a completely new genre by chance.
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I appreciate when niche genres are immediately recognizable by the cover art. Especially genres I don’t like. This sounds like a great example!
There is a genre I think of now as Young Childless Single People in NYC. I keep finding them by accident, because they don’t yet have standardized cover art. I hate this genre, but it is heavily promoted in “recent fiction.” I now will not read any novel that mentions NYC anywhere in the cover blurb.
-ethyl
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