A book jacket design for Louise Erdrich’s bestselling novel The Round House. Scene for image created using all analog methods and then photographed and edited in Adobe InDesign.
The book jacket’s concept centers on Joe, the 12-year-old main character whose innocence is destroyed after his mother is assaulted at the Round House on their Ojibwe reservation. With the justice system failing to help his mother, he feels forced to seek justice himself, stepping into adulthood far too soon.
To visualize Joe’s emotional transformation, I collected objects representing his boyhood (a worn pair of Vans, an old bike), adulthood (a discarded beer can), and his physical environment of the reservation (dirt, leaves, sticks, bark, branches, rocks). I created still lives out of these objects, photographed them, and digitally manipulated them in Photoshop and InDesign.
Initially, the objects felt like separate symbols rather than a cohesive story, so I developed the metaphor of a bike crash. Joe’s bike, a symbol of his boyhood, independence, yet the natural limitations of his age, crashes—representing how his life and innocence abruptly collapse, scattering the stability of his world and leaving him shaken.
To connect the crash to the event that caused it, I created the title typography by binding sticks with red thread by hand—sticks referencing the Round House and thread symbolizing the violence forever tied to this sacred space. Combined into one photo, the bike crash and typography convey how a traumatic event beyond Joe’s control uprooted his life and reshaped his identity.