My Green Face Tells Everything | Book Cover Design

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My Green Face Tells Everything by Marja Malmi

«На моём зелёном лице всё написано», автор Маръа Малми. Работа для конкурса «Обложка супер» от издательства Белая ворона/Albus Corvus.

This is my book cover prompt for a contest launched by Albus Corvus Publishing House (Moscow, Russia). The original YA fiction story reads about Sima, a Russian boy who moved to Finland from Petrozavodsk when his mother married a Finnish man. Sima opens up his teenage universe compiled of inside jokes, easter eggs referring to the pop-culture of the late Soviet 1980s, post-Soviet 1990s and to the infamous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Being a controversial character, the mother of the narrator stands at the center of it all and her sudden disappearance adds a mystical flair to the story.

Sima's face is covered with tiny silver birch leaves and this detail is an artistic metaphore for the chicken pox blisters which usually are treated by a brilliant green antiseptic (or zelyonka) in Russia. In the book, the main character suffers from it and therefore visits a hospital where a Finnish doctor immediately realizes the boy is from Russia just because his face is all marked with green dots. That is how the story got its name.

I have chosen the birch leaves instead of simple round green spots for the sake of the Finnish ambiance of the book as the silver birch is one of the national trees in Finland. Moreover, it is also widespread in Russia and this fact neatly compliments the complex background of Sima.