Author Justine Larbalestier shares some thoughts about a bad jacket-design experience. Her YA novel, Liar, features a protagonist named Micah, who is black. The girl on the cover, as you can see, is white. Larbalestier addresses why that is, why she’s upset about it and why she didn’t keep it from happening. Given that the book doesn’t publish until late September, something tells me they’ll find a way to change the cover before it hits the shelves… I hope so.

One excerpt from Larbalestier’s post:

Liar is a book about a compulsive (possibly pathological) liar who is determined to stop lying but finds it much harder than she supposed. I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black [. . .] One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.

(Via Light Reading)