By Gail P. Smith
In the airport the other day I picked up a copy of a book by
an author I really enjoy, Lisa Scottoline.
I read her non-fiction
My Nest Isn’t
Empty It Just Has More Closet Space last year and really loved it.
I was anxious to try out what she’s more
well-known for, her fiction.
One thing I must remember is that when a book says on the
cover “You won’t be able to put this one down,” sometimes, it’s true. This book grabs you right from the first
chapter and doesn’t let go until the end.
I really enjoyed it and if you like a fast-paced, well written action/mystery, you will too.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
From the first page:
“Melly sat alone at the end of the table, sorting her fruit
treats into a disjointed rainbow.
She
kept her head down, and her wavy dark blond hair fell into her face, covering
the port-wine birthmark on her cheek, a large round blotch like blusher gone
haywire.
It’s medical term was
nervus flammeus, an angry tangle of
blood vessels under the skin, but it was Melly’s own personal bulls’-eye.”
I flipped back to the cover and took a closer look at the
child in the cover photo. Hmmm, no
birthmark there that I could see.
Certainly not a large one, which is described in another spot in the
book as “like a plum.” This did not set
well with me.
I have a tiny bit of experience with birthmarks. Our first grandchild was born with a very
large strawberry mark, hemangioma. It was not like the character’s birthmark in
the story. Vallarie’s mark was mostly
invisible by the time she was five years old.
But for the first few years of her life it was very visible. I don’t know that she was ever teased but we
frequently heard, “What happened to her face?”
That’s when I began to notice that you never see children with
birthmarks portrayed in our country's media unless it’s a story about getting rid of the
birthmark.
I kept reading Save Me; as I mentioned, it was hard to put
down. But as I read, one thought kept nagging at me, “Why didn’t they use a
photo of a child with a birthmark on the cover?”
Melly’s birthmark and the reaction of other kids to it is
one of the main plot points that set the story in motion. Her family has
already left one school to escape bullies. Now she is teased about her face at a new
school and it is a pivotal motivation for what happens, plus introducing
bullying into the story. It is not an
insignificant part of this intriguing mystery.
Why then, did the publisher choose to use a photo of a child
with a perfect face on the cover? After
Lisa Scottoline worked so hard to convey in an entertaining and compassionate
way a message against bullying and the value of accepting and appreciating people
who may not look exactly like us, wouldn't the cover of such a book be an ideal
place to make that point by using a kid who actually had a birthmark, like "Melly"?
 |
| Vallarie about 6 months |
Maybe the “Mellys” of this world feel self-conscious because
even when they are portrayed in a positive light in a book, they still aren’t
good enough to grace the cover of that book.
Maybe the kids that bully them have never had a chance to see an
imperfect image in a magazine or TV show in our culture that tells kids
everywhere that all their value is in how they look.
Miss Scottoline’s character, Melly, is a gifted, sweet,
funny, and compassionate little girl that you can’t help but root for. It’s as easy to forget she has a mark on her
face as it was to forget the mark on our own granddaughter. I feel it’s a little insulting to Melly and
all the thousands of children like her to choose a perfect face for the cover
over a realistic one. After all, how
many times have you heard, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
I would never want to judge a book by its cover, but in this
case, I think the publisher, St. Martin's Griffin,
missed a great opportunity to encourage and affirm all those imperfect "Mellys" out there by letting them know they are worthy of a book cover, too.
