We are thrilled to be revealing the cover for T.L. Simpson’s Strong Like You, which follows an impoverished fifteen-year-old linebacker grapples with ideas about strength and masculinity after the dope-dealing father he idolized goes missing.
Releasing on March 12th 2024 from Flux Books, Strong Like You can be added to your Goodreads and it’s now available to pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or North Star Editions (where you can get 30% off spring release pre-orders using code SPRING2024 and free shipping when you spend over $100!).
Before we get to the big reveal, read on what T.L. thought about his cover, which was created by illustrator Caitlin O’Dwyer, designer Cynthia Della-Rovere, and Tina Doffing at Astound.
For the cover of STRONG LIKE YOU, we knew early on we wanted Walker displayed in the shadow of his father’s silhouette since that is very much on-theme for the novel. I knew I wanted an orange and blue color palette since those are the school colors for Walker’s football team and also colors I associate with the Ozarks, where he lives. Something about the burning orange sinking into the blue takes me straight to sunset, somewhere in Arkansas, the sun dipping into the mountains.
I was so enthralled by the original concept sketches I saw from Caitlin O’Dwyer, I thought they could have been the final version. Then the finalized version blew me away again. Walker looks tough yet downtrodden, as he is in the novel. His father, mysterious and proud.
I haven’t cried one time since you disappeared. Not even at football practice when Paton Roper told the whole team you were probably dead. He said, “You know how sometimes a dog gets sick or bites somebody and you have to put it down?”
Somebody said, “Yep.”
“That’s probably what happened to Walker’s daddy.”
Walker Lauderdale hasn’t cried once since his daddy went missing. And even though everyone says he’s dead, Walker won’t give up hope. He knows his father is out there, somewhere, cutting a wild trail through the Ozarks like always. But when a relative threatens to kick Walker and his momma out of the family home, Walker realizes he has no choice but to look for his daddy—a search that leads him straight to a drug-addled and dangerous man named Lukas Fisher. While attempting to balance life as a normal fifteen-year-old boy and star player on the football team, Walker begins a desperate search across the hills of the Ozarks for the man who, for better or worse, taught him everything he knows about strength.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T. L. Simpson is an award-winning journalist and editor of the Courier, a newspaper in his hometown of Russellville, Arkansas. Simpson spent nearly ten years covering high school and collegiate sports before taking over as editor. During that time, he was also the paper’s primary crime reporter. In a lot of ways, Strong Like You is the result of his experiences with covering both.
