Desert? Check. Giant disembodied woman’s face? Check. Wooden galleon ship awkwardly squatting on a set of inexplicably tiny wagon wheels like a Renaissance Faire gone rogue? Absolutely. Welcome to Slave to the Wheel, a visual mystery wrapped in a design disaster, soaked in sepia tones and sprinkled with every cut-and-paste crime imaginable.
Let’s start with the obvious: the star of the show, the ship-carriage-thing, looks like it rolled straight out of a fever dream. Its wheels—six of them, because why stop at four—are comically undersized and seem randomly lifted from a medieval trebuchet blueprint. They’re neither scaled properly nor aligned convincingly, leaving this Frankenstein vehicle stranded somewhere between naval confusion and Oregon Trail cosplay.
Hovering above the Martian-hued dunes is the ghost of every YA fantasy trope—a transparent woman’s face layered into the sky like a judgmental demigoddess of poorly blended stock photography. She is not amused. And neither is your inner graphic designer.
And then there’s the typography. It’s like a design student got bored halfway through their homework. Title font? Stiff and floaty. Series title? Awkwardly jammed to the left like it’s trying to escape. Subtitle “book two” meekly hangs out in lowercase like it lost a fight with punctuation. And then—bam!—the author name hits you with a bright baby blue, sans serif font that feels like it wandered in from a toothpaste commercial.
The color harmony? None. Composition? Absent. Cohesion? Missing in action. It’s as if someone tossed random fantasy elements into a blender, but forgot to put the lid on before hitting purée.
In short, Slave to the Wheel feels less like a journey into an epic world and more like a tragic tale of a designer held captive by WordArt. If there’s a metaphorical wheel involved here, it’s surely the one turning endlessly in the mind of the poor reader trying to make sense of this chaos.
This isn’t a cover. It’s a cautionary tale.
Well done, Clare Seven. You’ve earned yourself a permanent parking spot in the cover critique hall of infamy.