EEEE!

Very exciting news! My editor e-mailed me my cover yesterday!! Look:



(There's a larger version here if you'd like to see more detail on the painting, which is beautiful.)

Also note the incredibly flattering cover quote by Lauren Willig. I am the luckiest girl in the world.

I am so, so happy with this cover. I have heard a lot of horror stories about covers so I was a bit nervous about what mine would look like, but clearly the Dorchester art department is ACE. While in one small respect the cover doesn't fit the book (the book takes place in the middle of summer), I think it captures the mood of the book perfectly. I LOVE the way the warm sunset colors contrast with the snow. Plus red and gold has been my favorite color combination since I was about ten years old.

The cover also fits the book in another way that I think must be a coincidence (although I don't know for certain) but that means a lot to me personally. There's a scene early in the book where my impoverished hero is having dinner with Penelope and her nouveau riche parents, trying to win them over so they'll give their consent to the marriage.


It was as though he had the Midas touch. He went straight to her mother’s wall of sentimental engravings and old book illustrations in gilt frames, and pointed to a garishly-colored old engraving of Venice that her mother loved. "It's the Bridge of Sighs! Have you been to Venice, Miss Brown?"

"No," Penelope said. "I have never been out of England."

Mrs. Brown smiled. "Oh, those old pictures are all mine. Penny is much too elegant for such trifles! I hope very much to go to Venice with Mr. Brown someday."


Penelope, poor girl, is very concerned with appearing to have "elegant taste" at all times, since her parents sent her to boarding school with a lot of gently-bred girls and they all made fun of her for being a vulgar parvenue. I'm not entirely sure what type of wall-hangings she would prefer, but I'm guessing distantly-spaced original works in sober colors and plain frames, maybe contemporary landscapes or portraits. Gilt would NOT be involved. (Don't worry, she mostly gets over herself by the end of the book!)

I, on the other hand, think Mrs. Brown's wall sounds pretty, and it's an exaggerated version of something from my own life. On the wall by my parents' bed, there was a few feet between the window and the dresser where my mom had hung six or seven small romantic prints--a Hudson River School painting of the Amazon, a Bouguereau mother and child she got as a gift when I was born, a commemorative print my grandmother bought at the 1939 New York World's Fair, a sheet music cover my father bought her as a gift, and so on.

My mom died a few months after I wrote that scene (and long before I finished the book), but she was the audience I imagined while I was writing anyway. She read Pride and Prejudice aloud to me when I was nine, introduced me to Regency romances when I was twelve, and read my first manuscript when I was seventeen and told me it was good (in retrospect, it might have been more accurate to say it had potential).

The framed picture on the cover of In for a Penny would have fit right in on her wall, and that makes me very happy.