Book Cover Reviews: We've Already Gone This Far

As regulars on this site will know, sometimes I like to write about some of my favorite recent book cover designs.

Today, I'm admiring this beauty from Lucy Kim for Patrick Dacey's We've Already gone This Far. Lucy is a New York based designer working at Henry Holt. Prior to that, Lucy was at Penguin Group for 14 years.

Let's take a look at the blurb:

In Patrick Dacey's stunning debut, we meet longtime neighbors and friends – citizens of working-class Wequaquet – right when the ground beneath their feet has shifted in ways they don't yet understand. Here, after more than a decade of boom and bust, love and pride are closely twinned and dangerously deployed: a lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighbor's veteran son; a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television; a young father walks away from one of the few jobs left in town, a soldier writes home to a mother who is becoming increasingly unhinged. We've Already Gone This Far takes us to a town like many towns in America, a place where people are searching for what is now an almost out-of-reach version of the American Dream.

Story by story, Dacey draws us into the secret lives of recognizable strangers and reminds us that life's strange intensity and occasional magic is all around us, especially in the everyday. With a skewering insight and real warmth of spirit, Dacey delivers that rare and wonderful thing in American fiction: a deeply-felt, deeply-imagined book about where we've been and how far we have to go.

The picture captures the mood perfectly. The snow covered buildings with drooping cables creating an eerie, almost post-apocalyptic image of a town that has simply given up. But the sunrise in the background hints of more to the story – an optimism, perhaps even a future. The typeface is perfect. The opaque counter in the letters beautifully mimics the snow-filled windows of the house in the foreground, whilst the careful fading (white at the top, blue at the bottom) provides just enough of a contrast to the background color to avoid the use of drop shadow.

We've Already Gone This Far was published by Henry Holt on February 16, 2016.

What do you think? Dump your thoughts, like a fresh fall of snow, in the comments box below.