This is a cover design I created for City Mouse, the debut novel by Stacey Lender. It is not the cover that the author and publisher chose. It is the cover I wish they’d selected.
The novel is the story of a successful New Yorker, Jessica—a mother and wife in her thirties—who makes the seismic shift to a life as a suburban commuter. She is a stranger in a strange land. Her dreams of a bucolic life are upended by her new neighbors and her new environment.
Suggesting a direction for the cover design, the publisher mentioned Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. At first I thought it an odd juxtaposition. But then I realized it could serve as an inspired take on the disillusioned protagonist—lost, alone, and self-obsessed—in cookie-cutter suburbia.
This cover was designed to wrap around the back and include a folded front cover.