Cover Lover - Croak

That's right. It's that time again. Time for me to share my newest favorite in dark and slightly twisted cover art.

Publisher's summary:  Sixteen-year-old Lex Bartleby has sucker-punched her last classmate. Fed up with her punkish, wild behavior, her parents ship her off to upstate New York to live with her Uncle Mort for the summer, hoping that a few months of dirty farm work will whip her back into shape. But Uncle Mort’s true occupation is much dirtier than that of shoveling manure.

He’s a Grim Reaper. And he’s going to teach her the family business.

Lex quickly assimilates into the peculiar world of Croak, a town populated entirely by reapers who deliver souls from this life to the next. Along with her infuriating yet intriguing partner Driggs and a rockstar crew of fellow Grim apprentices, Lex is soon zapping her Targets like a natural born Killer.

Yet her innate ability morphs into an unchecked desire for justice—or is it vengeance?—whenever she’s forced to Kill a murder victim, craving to stop the attackers before they can strike again. So when people start to die—that is, people who aren’t supposed to be dying, people who have committed grievous crimes against the innocent—Lex’s curiosity is piqued. Her obsession grows as the bodies pile up, and a troubling question begins to swirl through her mind: if she succeeds in tracking down the murderer, will she stop the carnage—or will she ditch Croak and join in?

Why we love it: I was a big fan of the television show Dead Like Me, and this book cover, title, and description remind me a lot of that show. In the show, the reapers were living without real connections to other humans, and they were never quite sure if what they were doing was truly right or wrong. I kind of get this from the description of Croak.

The title's font has the appearance of being written with chalk. Add to that the use of a skull for the letter O and the smirk on the girl's face and you get a sense of the dark humor that this book may contain. The hoodie gives the girl a definite teen look (and reminds me a bit of Vladimir Tod), but that very shiny and very deadly scythe brings it all home: this is not a book about rainbows and fluffy bunnies.