Top Ten Tuesday: Purple, Yellow, and/or Green Book Covers

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

PREVIOUS TOP TEN TUESDAY TOPICS:

• December 29: Favourite Books of 2020
• January 5: Most Anticipated Releases of 2021
• January 12: Resolutions / Hopes for 2021
• January 19: Books I Meant to Read In 2020 but Didn’t Get To
• January 26: New-To-Me Authors I Read in 2020
• February 2: Books Written Before I Was Born
• February 9: Valentine’s Day / Love Freebie

This week’s topic is wonderfully random: today is the day on which Mardi Gras falls so we are looking at bringing together books with not other connection save that their covers features the three colours of the Mardi Gras flag: purple, yellow and green. There doesn’t seem to be much agreement on whether the colours should be horizontal, vertical or diagonal – but apparently the colours symbolise

• faith (green)
• power (gold)
• justice (purple)

I might take that with a pinch of salt personally.

Now I have to be honest, I had no idea that there was a Mardi Gras flag – and there is something about Mardi Gras which is simultaneously deeply appealing and an experience that I feel sure would make me equally deeply uncomfortable. All those people. The noise. There is something Bacchanalian and liberating and dangerous in my perception of Mardi Gras… and of course it is a long way from these Anglican shores! A nice pancake with lemon and sugar will do for our cold blood!

And of course it is a long way from these Anglican shores! A nice pancake with lemon and sugar will do for our cold blood today!

And these were rather hard to find! My bookcases are not ordered by colour (a sacrifice of utilty for style) and most of my reading is through a black and white kindle so this is the result of a lot of scrolling!

Green

Meddling Kids, Edgar Cantero

1990. The teen detectives once known as the Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in the Zoinx River Valley in Oregon) are all grown up and haven’t seen each other since their fateful, final case in 1977. 

An exuberant and wickedly entertaining celebration of horror, love, friendship, and many-tentacled, interdimensional demon spawn.

The Searcher, Tana French

Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a remote Irish village would be the perfect escape. After twenty-five years in the Chicago police force, and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens.

But then a local kid comes looking for his help. His brother has gone missing, and no one, least of all the police, seems to care. Cal wants nothing to do with any kind of investigation, but somehow he can’t make himself walk away.

Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi

BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman – craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.

SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished – exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.

The Rehearsal, Eleanor Catton

A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve … 

Gold

Girl A, Abigail Dean

Lex Gracie doesn’t want to think about her family. She doesn’t want to think about growing up in her parents’ House of Horrors. And she doesn’t want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped. When her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can’t run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the House of Horrors into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her six siblings – and with the childhood they shared.

Here Is The Beehive, Sarah Crossan

For three years, Ana has been consumed by an affair with Connor, a client at her law firm. Their love has been consigned to hotel rooms and dark corners of pubs, keeping their relationship hidden from the world. So the morning that Ana’s company receives a call to say that Connor is dead, her secret grief has nowhere to go. Desperate for an outlet, Ana seeks out the shadowy figure who has always stood just beyond her reach – Connor’s wife Rebecca.

How Much Of These Hills is Gold, C Pam Zhang

Ba dies in the night, Ma is already gone. Lucy and Sam, twelve and eleven, are suddenly alone and on the run. With their father’s body on their backs, they roam an unforgiving landscape dotted with giant buffalo bones and tiger paw prints, searching for a place to give him a proper burial.

Purple

Cinderella is Dead, Kalynn Bayron

Sophia knows the story though, off by heart. Because every girl has to recite it daily, from when she’s tiny until the night she’s sent to the royal ball for choosing. And every girl knows that she has only one chance. For the lives of those not chosen by a man at the ball . are forfeit.

But Sophia doesn’t want to be chosen – she’s in love with her best friend, Erin, and hates the idea of being traded like cattle. And when Sophia’s night at the ball goes horribly wrong, she must run for her life. Alone and terrified, she finds herself hiding in Cinderella’s tomb. And there she meets someone who will show her that she has the power to remake her world .

Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

When glamorous socialite Noemí Taboada receives a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging to be rescued from a mysterious doom, it’s clear something is desperately amiss. Catalina has always had a flair for the dramatic, but her claims that her husband is poisoning her and her visions of restless ghosts seem remarkable, even for her.

Noemí’s chic gowns and perfect lipstick are more suited to cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing, but she immediately heads to High Place, a remote mansion in the Mexican countryside, determined to discover what is so affecting her cousin.

The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

For with the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the ‘clerk class’, the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.

FORTHCOMING TOP TEN TUESDAY TOPICS:

• February 23: Books That Made Me Laugh Out Loud (Claire @ Book Lovers Pizza)
• March 2: Characters Whose Job I Wish I Had (maybe not even because the job sounds fun, but maybe the co-workers are cool or the boss is hot?)
• March 9: Spring Cleaning Freebie (for example, books you’re planning to get rid of for whatever reason, book’s you’d like to clean off your TBR by either reading them or deciding you’re not interested, books that feel fresh and clean to you after winter is over, etc.)
• March 16: Books On My Spring 2021 TBR
• March 23: Funny Book Titles
• March 30: Places In Books I’d Love to Live