The Ballads of Suburbia cover revealed!

I know a lot of people have been wondering what the cover of Ballads of Suburbia looks like and I've been going nuts because I've known for a few months now, but final touches needed to be made and approvals gotten. This has been a terrible, awful, anxiety-filled week because one of my cats is really sick, but the bright spot of my day is that I finally get to share this with you:

(click on the cover to see it larger!)

There it is. I love it in a completely different way than the last cover. That cover was like instant love. This one I had to ponder briefly. The lettering of Suburbia is perfect; it matches the cover of the notebook my characters keep in the book. But because Ballads of Suburbia is set in a real place, and this is not a photo of the real place, that threw me for a minute. Then I realized that this is wayyyy more visually interesting than the real place. And the sky, the duck, it makes the photo so eerie and unsettling- not in like a horror movie way, but in a "bad things will happen in this innocent-seeming place" way, which totally fits the book. The shadow of the duck, the boot prints in the sand, the streetlights. It's just perfect. The only thing I asked was if there could be some evidence that teenagers were there: cigarette butts, beer bottles, graffiti. They went with the last option and added that graffiti on the slide. I think it was the perfect touch.

So yeah, I'm thrilled and I'm hoping the cover draws you in and makes you wonder "Man, what is going to happen in this place, in the book behind this cover."

Here is the back jacket copy for those of you who haven't heard about it yet:

There are so many ballads. Achy breaky country songs. Mournful pop songs. Then there’s the rare punk ballad, the ballad of suburbia: louder, faster, angrier . . . till it drowns out the silence.

Kara hasn’t been back to Oak Park since the end of junior year, when a heroin overdose nearly killed her and sirens heralded her exit. Four years later, she returns to face the music. Her life changed forever back in high school: her family disintegrated, she ran around with a whole new crowd of friends, she partied a little too hard, and she fell in love with gorgeous bad boy Adrian, who left her to die that day in Scoville Park. . . .

Amidst the music, the booze, the drugs, and the drama, her friends filled a notebook with heartbreakingly honest confessions of the moments that defined and shattered their young lives. Now, finally, Kara is ready to write her own.

My website will be re-launched next week with a new Ballads of Suburbia look to it and you'll be able to learn more about the real Scoville Park and read the first chapter (though you already can read an earlier version of it here). I'll also have a book trailer coming soon and will be running contests for ARCs, so keep an eye on my blog. My street team always gets news first, so you may want to join. And of course if you're psyched, you can preorder from Amazon :)

So let me know what you think of the cover and please, as a favor, send good energy/thoughts to my sick kitty Sid.