What is your cover and front matter telling your reader?

To kick off my analysis of our next book—N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became—I’m going to start even before the opening lines. I did a brief analysis of the cover and title of The Dutch House in my post on its opening, but let’s take that examination a little deeper and look at all of the front matter—everything we encounter before the first sentence—in The City We Became.

Let’s start with the title. The cover art tells us that the city of the title must be New York. But it’s an off-kilter New York with an impossible collage of a view that makes it look as if the city’s iconic buildings and monuments (the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building, and the Statue of Liberty) are massed on the East River around the Williamsburg Bridge, ready for an attack coming by way of Brooklyn. The title and some of the other graphic elements are given an electric, jittery color treatment that make them look like an anaglyph, one of those composite images meant to be seen through stereoscopic glasses. Something is slightly off, slightly on edge in this New York City, the cover tells us.

And what about the rest of the title? Who is “we” and how does this personified group become a city? Jemisin’s choice to use the past tense verb “became” is important too, signaling that the story is over and finished (the becoming is completed) but we are going to be told how it happened. The title is also in first person, not third: not “The City They Become” but the more dynamic, energetic, and inclusive “The City We Became.”

Let’s see how these initial impressions and questions develop as we start turning pages. First, we get an epigraph, a quote from novelist Thomas Wolfe: “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” The primary purpose of an epigraph is to hint at the theme of a book. In this case, the epigraph builds on two elements of the title: It personifies New York City, casting it as a social entity like a family or a team, and it also includes the reader. You, the reader, are included in the “we” of the title, and you belong to New York, Wolfe tells us, even if you don’t know it yet.

A secondary function of an epigraph can be to signal that other authors have found your theme or topic to be worthy of study, and to signal that your book is part of that conversation in the larger world of ideas. Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again, is known for writing about place, so Jemisin is joining that thematic conversation. Note that the epigraph is quite short. I think that’s the best choice for fiction: You don’t want readers to get bogged down in the rhythms and ideas of another writer before they get to your words.

Next up: a map! I do love a book with a map in the front. Right away it signals adventure, travel, new places. As a practical matter, a map orients readers to the geography of the novel and gives us a place to return to if we get lost. What clues about the story does this map in particular give us? The map is styled as a photograph of what looks like a simplified, 1950s-era map of the five boroughs of New York City, printed on heavy paper that has been neatly folded and reopened. The map itself reminds us how small Manhattan is in comparison to Brooklyn and Queens, and also how the boroughs seem to share allegiances with other land masses—the Bronx being pulled north to upstate, Staten Island sidling over next to New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens locked into the larger entity of Long Island.

Laid on top of the map is a business card for an entity called the “Better New York Foundation.” The card has a notation that the foundation is “a subsidiary of Tmw. Inc.” and the tagline “Prosperity and Progress,” the kind of bland corporate jargon that makes you wonder what sin it is covering up. The business card overlaps a magnet or sticker shaped like one of the big old taxicabs that roamed mid-century New York City and advertises a business called “Checker Cab Dream Weddings.” It includes a phone number too (the business card does not), which caught my eye immediately because it is standard copyediting advice not to include a real phone number, email address, website, etcetera in a novel unless you are prepared to create it in the real world. Well, guess what? Jemisin—or her publisher—has done just that. When you call 212-816-7469, you get a message informing you that “City” is unavailable and urging you to try an “alternate contact method.” Ominous! Where is “City” and how else can I reach them?

Also pictured on top of the map is a pen, which has been used to make handwritten notes. There is a list of cities at the bottom with two, New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, crossed out. A note under Long Island reads “HERE THERE BE DRAGONS.” Studying the map more closely, we can see that the Williamsburg Bridge is crossed out and there are creepy tentacles emerging from various spots across the city and jellyfish-like creatures poised over others. What is happening in this New York?

Do you see just how much information you can convey about your book before the reader encounters the first words of the story?

Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.