Of course it’s sad, but it isn’t new.

The latest epsiode of white-washing a book cover, involves author Justine Larbalestier’s YA book, Liar.

As you can see, the cover clearly features a white girl, with long hair, however, apparently Larbalestier’s lead is a black girl with very short hair.

Here’s part of the Galleycat article:

When YA fantasy author Justine Larbalestier gave her fans a first look at the American cover for Liar, back in April, she was understandably excited: “This cover was so well received by sales and marketing at Bloomsbury that for the first time in my career a cover for one of my books became the image used for the front of the catalogue,” she blogged. “Apparently all the big booksellers went crazy for it. My agent says it was a huge hit in Bologna. And at TLA many librarians and teenagers told me they adore this cover.”

The love, however, is not universal. Earlier this week, an unnamed “outraged, nauseous, [and] flabbergasted” children’s book editor blogging at Editorial Anonymous took issue with the cover, noting that Liar is about a young girl who is “black, with very short hair, and is mistaken for a boy early on in the book by teachers and fellow students,” which is pretty much the exact opposite of the model who has wound up on the dust jacket…

As Alicia, a YA librarian blogger, frames the question: “Did the publishers not want to put a black girl on the cover for fear of not selling enough books to their white customers?”…

To address these complaints, Larbalestier has written a new blog post, revealing that she fought that cover every step of the way: “I never wanted a girl’s face on the cover,” she says. “Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah. I strongly objected to all of them. I lost.”

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