Blog Hop and Follow Friday!

Hello blog hoppers!

Welcome to The Smarty Owl.

Newbies: be sure to check out our reviews!

Old Followers: thanks for coming back :)

And also to our loyal followers, we are oh-so-sorry for the lack of posts this week :( High school is hectic! We still need to fix up a scheduling system, but no worries, we'll deliver :)

Follow Me Friday is hosted by Parajunkee's View

Book Blogger Hop is hosted by Crazy for Books

And without further ado, this weeks blog hop question:

Do you judge a book by its cover?

Answer: Despite the constant hearings of "don't judge a book by its cover" I must admit that I honestly do. It is not right, and it doesn't do the book justice, but while browsing shelves, I really can't help but snigger at the books with bad covers. Covers honestly make an impact on whether you pick up the book at the store. A novel with an alluring, interesting, unforgettable cover will linger in your mind forever until you finally have to submit and buy it. Unattractive covers however, make you lose interest even if the synopsis is intelligent. Those covers always give you the feeling that the book might just be as bad as the cover. Of course, with everything in nature, there are exceptions. The Harry Potter covers are a bit childish and not very curious, yet the content and words hidden beneath it proves to be infinitely better. The Twilight covers are elegant with just enough mystery in them to pull you in. Although once you get to the meat of the novel, you realize the cover was giving you false hope. This is just my personal opinion.

I love covers that have actual connections to the novels, yet still make you long to uncover the unknown by reading it. And that is also how we judge our covers here on The Smarty Owl. After every review, there is a paragraph displaying our thoughts on the cover. We rate them out of 5, 5 being the best. We also provide an explanation for our rating so be sure to check it out in the future!

Example: Our cover examination for The Book Thief

"Cover: 3.5/5 - I personally enjoyed the cover. First of all I thought it was well designed artistically and second, this cover would have hooked me at the bookstore (if my mother hadn't bought my copy for me). Like the actual book, the cover has quite a bit of symbolism in it too. In our perspective (Okapi and I pondered about the symbolism in the cover for a bit), the dominoes represent the people, both Jewish and German, who are getting knocked down by the hand, who we think is a representation of Hitler using words to hurt people. Thus causing a whole chain reaction leading to death, violence, and hurt to many. Though such a strong message is portrayed in such a simple picture, we believe that the picture could relate to the book a bit more, and therefore our rating of a 3.5 out of 5."