This reminds me of that time when I was supposed to read a book for a midterm exam and since it was going to be only one question (of the ‘write away until you run out of paper’ type) out of four I just read the highly informative back cover a few times and harped on it for half a page and got through. I still have the book and one day, probably soon, I'll finally read it.
You got lucky, as some back cover blurbs actually don't have anything to do with the story.
For instance, if you were to do a book report or review of
Young Rissa, by F.M. Busby, I'd give an F to anyone who only went by the back cover and didn't read the book. The back cover got some of the most important points of the book completely wrong. It's obvious that whoever wrote that blurb never read the book.
This is from one of the editions (not the one I have, but my edition's blurb is similar and equally dead wrong):
Rissa breathes a sigh of relief as the ship lifts off. It seems she has escaped danger, and no one has recognized the scientifically altered being as the beautiful young heir to the Hilzein Establishment—or so it seems. Possessing the only force capable of challenging the tyranny that devastated the Earth and universe, Rissa can do almost anything—then again, almost anything can happen to her while she is doing it too.
No, she didn't breathe a sigh of relief as the ship lifted off, because she was in cryogenic freeze and wouldn't even have known when the ship lifted off. The ships in this novel use STL (slower than light) travel, so the trip would take approximately a year ship-time but about a dozen years by Earth time. Rissa was in disguise, traveling on an enemy ship, and didn't want to risk keeping up her assumed identity while awake, so she opted for travel in a freeze chamber.
She escaped
one danger, but she isn't really
out of danger until the final chapter. The rest of the blurb is even more ridiculous and BS. She wasn't ever scientifically altered, and she's not the heir to the Hulzein Establishment (though she later marries into that family). She possesses no "force" capable of taking down the tyranny on Earth (just sheer determination, guts, and a number of other talents, none of which are paranormal or superhero-type crap), and the universe itself is hardly involved. The entire 8-book series takes place within the Milky Way galaxy (necessary, as the spaceships are STL for most of the series and FTL only really matters in the final two novels).
It seems to many of the other characters that Rissa can do "almost anything" but she's merely a very intelligent young woman, who had the benefit of a comprehensive survival training regimen involving many different situations from a dueling arena to political and corporate boardrooms. What she learns about spaceships is on-the-job training and that isn't in the first novel.
I can forgive the artist for the ridiculous design of this spaceship (the second one she's on, not the one where she escapes from Earth; in this one the freeze chambers don't work, so she's up and about), since the ships weren't described in much detail in this novel (they were in other books in the series), but come on... they're out in space between solar systems, so it's not going to be that pretty blue color outside the window, and that window is stupid ship design anyway. There was never a scene where she used a weapon aboard a ship and barely a few words mentioning the part of the survival training where she even learns to use weapons.
The artwork's good enough... but that's not a scene in the book and Rissa's hair color is all wrong (none of the cover artists in any edition I've seen got her right - either wrong coloring, too old, too young... she's 17 at this point, not 40-ish, as one edition made her look).
So... as I said, you got lucky using the back cover blurb. That's something that was one of the panel discussion topics at a convention I went to years ago, btw. The SF conventions I attended had their focus on writing, publishing, and art, and what happens is that many artists are only given a bare-bones explanation of what the story's about - if at all. That's why so many books have generic covers, unless it's a well-known TV/movie tie-in franchise where the artists would have other material to go by.
Blurb writers... yikes. The one who did the above novel must not have paid even the slightest attention to any information given about the plot, or chose to make the protagonist out to be some kind of space superhero, to attract the buyers.
Of course there's no point complaining to the authors, as they don't usually have the clout to dictate things like cover art and blurbs. I met F.M. Busby and his wife at a convention in Calgary, in the late '80s. Very nice folks, and I had the opportunity to chat with both of them on a few subjects... cats, fanzines - Mrs. Busby invited me to join her APA but due to the financial commitment required I wasn't able to - and I told Busby himself that the kind of corporate world government with Total Welfare Centers and Committee Police was somewhat disturbing as it seemed plausible. He pooh-poohed that, saying, "It's only a story"... but he died in 2005 (and stopped writing well before that). There are some things going on now that are actually fairly close to some of the things he wrote about (not the space travel or aliens, obviously, but how multinational corporations have insinuated themselves into various nooks and crannies of political campaigns and subsequent governments, and massive refugee migrations - yeah, he called those).
I think Whitehead was probably on the guest list of my fantasy dinner-party-with-celebrities already, with The Underground Railroad, but he's cementing his place on the sofa with every page.
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