Didn't I just write one of these? Anyway, extremely pleased to announce that we now have a cover for my third 2024 book, WE SPEAK THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN! (Illustration by Veronica Park, art direction by Jessica Alberta, my editor is Jen Albert with ECW Press.)
The official ECW page is here and preorders are already open! Which is very exciting!
Once again I was incredibly privileged to be invited back to help come up with a cover for the novella! We met on Zoom to chat about the kind of vibes we wanted for this book, and how we wanted it to be both different from, but recognizably a partner to, THE ANNUAL MIGRATION OF CLOUDS.
I loved the idea of keeping the bird theme (and I have a bird in mind for the third book too SHHHHH) and changing up the colour scheme a little bit -- and when Veronica suggested two birds we all leapt on the idea. This is a very different book from 'Clouds.' Reid isn't presented with a choice that she's been offered alone, that she needs to make alone, and we already know about the Cad parasite. In this book, we liked the idea of presenting the kind of -- conflict but also cooperation but also proximity of two communities coming together. It's not like one bird 'is' Reid and one bird 'is' Howse, but we wanted the cover to kind of say... you've left Kansas, kid. You're in the mountains now, you'll meet new birds, you're still carrying your parasite, your passenger, your muse and your daemon with you. How will they treat you? Who will they see?
I literally could not be more pleased with this gorgeous cover, from the colours to the poses of the whiskeyjacks to the two subspecies rendered here to the motion of the vegetation around them. There's so much tension and motion; this isn't Reid's quiet campus where every day looks the same. Her every skill of... not just perceiving, memorizing, tracking, hunting, but also of whatever diplomacy and tact she's managed to learn back home, will be needed here if she's to survive. And as for the recreation of human nature, well... there are as many of those as there are humans in the world.
Anyway, I adore it, and I hope folks will pre-order!