Judging the Book By Its Cover

Judging The Book By Its Cover: The Book of Secrets

Aubrey Leaman

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It’s true that we’re all guilty of judging books by their covers…but what if we embraced that tendency to come up with stories of our own?

Thanks to Ellisaveta for the idea to make a series out of my previous post, What Happens When You Actually Judge a Book By Its Cover? The idea is to find a picture of a book that you know nothing about and imagine what the story might be like inside its pages…

My Idea: The Book of Secrets has been lost for centuries. But now, Emma is about to discover it.

Alternating between the Book’s “perspective” and Emma’s perspective, we watch as she draws ever nearer to it. But the nearer she gets, the more the Book of Secrets is tantalizingly out of her reach—as if by magic. Will she ever meet it face to face?

Goodreads Summary: “After more than twenty years of marriage, Chloe Sinclair comes home one night to find that her husband, Nate, is gone. All he has left behind is a cryptic note explaining that he’s returned to their childhood town, a place Chloe never wants to see again.

While trying to reach Nate, Chloe stumbles upon a notebook tucked inside his antique copy of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Written in code, the pages contain long-buried secrets from their past, and clues to why he went home after all these years. As Chloe struggles to decipher the notebook’s hidden messages, she revisits the seminal moments of their youth: the day she met the enigmatic Sinclair children and the increasingly dangerous games they played to escape their troubled childhoods; the first time Nate kissed her, camped out on the beach like Robinson Crusoe; and the elaborate plan she and Nate devised, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, to break away from his oppressive father. As the reason for Nate’s absence comes to light, the truth will forever shatter everything Chloe knows — about her husband, his family, and herself.” (Find it on Goodreads)

Results: The main character is getting closer and closer to discovering something important, but Arnold’s story has the Book of Secrets helping her instead of being the end goal. It also sounds more like realistic fiction than the fantasy that I imagined. Overall, it seems awesomely mysterious, but also pretty tragic…

What other stories can you imagine that would match this cover? Feel free to post them under the tag #judging the book by its cover.

13 thoughts on “Judging The Book By Its Cover: The Book of Secrets”

  1. Hello Aubrey- what a great idea for a post! I have just come up with the following (maybe you’d like to continue it…;) )
    The telephone rang out.
    “Oh answer that will you Roger?” Emma called from upstairs.
    Roger sighed and picked up the receiver. “Yes? I see, I’ll tell her thank you.”
    “Roger? Who was it?”
    He stood by the bathroom door. “Your Great Aunt Mary is dead and has left you a box of things at her house.”
    ” Oh, I didn’t know her that well..poor old thing..”
    “Probably a pile of old junk, as if you haven’t enough of that already-”
    “Why do you have to be so negative Roger?”
    He turned and went down the stairs. “I need a brandy after the day I have just had,” he muttered to himself as Emma wasn’t listening, her mind on the box of old things.
    …………………………………………………………………………..
    She climbed the stairs to the attic and found the box, well it was actually a trunk, with a layer of dust sitting on its lid. As she opened it the dust flew into the air in protest of losing its home, curling and whirling into the air and sparkling in the mid morning sunshine that streamed through the window.
    Emma peered onto the trunk and rummaged through it. A pair of 1950s stockings in an unopened packet, a child’s spinning top, a bag of wool and knitting needles, three Val Doonican LPS, 4 knitted cardigans, a box of pencils..hmm maybe Roger was right after all…then..a book. Not just any book by the looks of it, but one with a beautiful red cloth cover and gold embossed patterns. It looked old and smelled old. The title was intriguing- The Book of Secrets.
    Excited, Emma opened the book. To her surprise the words were hand written in copperplate writing with fountain pen ink.
    “There are some things that one cannot speak of, that one dare not say…”

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      4. Tell me about it Aubrey! I have a lot of online courses I am doing now (ones to boost my cv)- I hope to complete them all by the first week of October so I can spend more time on my art and fiction. I also have an artwork commission (but there is no rush for it, although I will start working on it next week).

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  4. Pingback: Judging the Book By Its Cover: Dinosaurs, Robots, and Dinosaur Robots | If Mermaids Wore Suspenders

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