Circe by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury)

A nymph faces the joys and lonelinesses of independence in this feminist reworking of Greek myth from an Orange winner — Aida Edemariam, The Guardian

The overall cover design is pretty appealing, but in this case it’s not due to the fonts. Effloresce is described as “an old timey, condensed display font”. To me it’s just ugly, sorry. Its proportions are all over the place, and the tiptoeing R and the clenched g make me shudder. Even if you are into such quaint typefaces, there are better options, also technical. Effloresce Antique has some serious spacing issues, see the ra pair in “Orange”. At 1,415 kerning pairs, I must assume they’re intentional. The forced justification of the author’s name doesn’t help either, when the L has so much inner whitespace already. FM Bolyar is one of those bloated families that include every possible variety of distression as a separate font — it’s now at 80 styles. I guess there are situations where it comes in handy to have a certain pre-distressed variant. But I fear that most of the styles will hardly ever be used. And those who choose to use a grunged variant will often customize it anyway, just as it is the case here: The designer made the letterforms of FM Bolyar Rust One N 700 considerably narrower, and apparently adjusted the speckle pattern, too.

See also the US cover designed by Will Staehle for Little, Brown.