The Friday Face-Off: Water, Water Everywhere

The Friday Face-Off is a bookish meme hosted by Books by Proxy that compares book covers to decide which is best.

This week’s theme:

Water, Water Everywhere

A cover that features water

Welcome to another Friday Face-off! This time we’ll pit the covers of Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon against each other. Why Lagoon? Because it’s a novel I’ve often heard mentioned by SFF booktubers and I’d love to try another of Okorafor’s work since her young-adult fantasy novel Akata Witch was such fun to read. Lagoon is an adult science fiction novel. It’s about an alien invasion in Nigeria. Well, then, let’s get to the

Face-off!

US cover

Both covers are attractive in their own way. The huge water bubble at the top of the US cover draws your eye to it but doesn’t keep it there. However, the illustration on the UK cover is sure to attract and hold the viewer’s eye. The white space in the letters calls out to me and once I look at the cover, it’s hard to look away. The illustrations are captivating and make me want to look closer in case I might have missed something when standing so far away. It makes me want to know what happens in the story.

The US cover is a photograph by Franklin Kappa through Getty Images. The novel was published by Simon & Schuster imprint Saga Press. The UK cover was published by Hodder & Stoughton and illustrated by Joey Hi-Fi, a South African illustrator. I love Joey’s work! Every time I see the cover of Apocalypse Now Now (the red, white, and black one), I want to get it. Obviously, the winner is:

I really like this cover. I love the color, illustrations, everything. This is the copy I hope to get when I’m ready to read the book. For more on the novel and the cover design, visit Okorafor’s blog.

Which cover do you prefer?

And have you read Lagoon?