Cover Designs! #38: The Wonders

 

Cover Designs is a feature in which I try to match up the outfit on a book cover with a dress pattern and sometimes even potential fabric matches as well.

Today's pick is The Wonders by Elena Medel.

Summary from publisher:

The Wonders follows Maria and Alicia through the streets of Madrid, from job to job and apartment to apartment, as they search for meaning and stability in a precarious world and unknowingly trace each other’s footfalls across time.

Maria moved to the city in 1969, leaving her daughter with her family but hoping to save enough to take care of her one day. She worked as a housekeeper, then a caregiver, and later a cleaner, and somehow she was always taking care of someone else. Two generations later, in 2018, Alicia was working at the snack shop in Madrid’s Atocha train station when it overflowed with protestors and strikers. All women—and so many of them—protesting what? Alicia wasn’t entirely sure. She couldn’t have known that Maria was among them. Alicia didn’t have time for marches; she was just trying to hang on until the end of her shift, when she might meet someone to take her away for a few hours, to make her forget.

Readers will fall in love with Maria and Alicia, whose stories finally converge in the chaos of the protests, the weight of the years of silence hanging thickly in the air between them. The Wonders brings half a century of the feminist movement to life, and launches an inimitable new voice in fiction.

While we only see the cover dress from the back, this long sleeved shift dress should be pretty easy to replicate. It's the fabric that might be tricky! 

You might want to try the free Shayla shift dress from Tiana's Closet. We don't know what the front of this cover dress looks like, so it just might be the casual V-neck of the Shayla. This pattern also has a sweet button detail on the sleeve for that something extra.

Or you might prefer the Ultimate Shift Dress by Sew Over It, even if there is a bit of a difference -- the SOI shift has a back opening at the neckline, unlike our cover image. But it's close! 

Or if you wanted to try copying this in a knit, the Jalie Nicole might be just the one! The centre line drawing has just the same silhouette. 

Of course, to really get the look of this, a cityscape panel print would be the best fit. I couldn't find any quite like this one, but there are a number of city prints on Spoonflower that would be fun to try out, and the good thing about that is that you could go with woven or knit, whichever you preferred. Here are a few ideas! 

Urban Tapestry Abstract Cityscape by Paula Bagy

City Blocks by boldtvillemayor

City Big by j9design

Shades of Blue City by SweetCoolVibes

While none of these fabrics are exactly like the cover image, the city imagery could carry the theme over into a potential real life make! And if you're fortunate enough to find a panel print, a shift dress is always a great choice to make the most of it, no matter what the design.