Real People & Undead Girl Gang
Lily Anderson’s Undead Girl Gang is a contemporary, coming-of-age-esque story featuring Mila Flores who is attempting to uncover the truth behind the death of her best friend—as well as two mean girls at her school. To do this, she brings the girls back to life with her amateur witchcraft knowledge, hoping they’ll help her uncover the truth of their deaths—what she believes was a murder.
The paperback cover prominently features a brown-skinned girl on the front, sassily standing with her hip cocked, front and center with her thumbs tucked in her jean pockets. It’s obvious that the protagonist is a person of color, specifically one who’s confident and probably ready to take on what the world throws at her.
A Latinx identity is not something that can be identified solely by a person’s race, but the model’s brown skin communicates that the protagonist is a person of color, and ethnicity is further suggested to the consumer through examination of the summary on back cover of the paperback.
The specific #OwnVoices nature of the book may be harder for a consumer to identify—reading the book will provide information that Mila is a biracial Mexican teen and reading the author’s website will reveal that Anderson is an Afrolatina from the Bay Area. These specifics are certainly hard to identify, especially if one picks this book up in an isolated setting, rather than having others describe the book to them, but the ultimate message, that this is a story that centers a powerful woman of color, is well communicated through this cover.
Unlike Don’t Date Rosa Santos, there are not many other signals of potential Latinx representation from locational aesthetics on the cover, but the suggestions the model herself presents is an important signal that informs buyers.
The representation of a brown woman of color on the cover sets a consumer on the path to further invest themself into this novel, acting as a more subtle signal to Undead Girl Gang's Latinx main character. The importance of this representation will be further analyzed through the comparison with the original hardback dust jacket design.