Vivid Book Cover About a Girl's Experience of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

Title: Synanon Kid Sub Title: A memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

C.A. Wittman

C.A. Wittman's memoir Synanon Kid offers a rare glimpse into a young girl's experience in the Synanon Cult where the author spent 5 years of her childhood. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

Wittman's other work includes The Visitors, a young-adult novel.

During a weekend visit to her uncle’s home in Riverside Valley, California, Celena Wittman was taken by two radicalized women, one of whom, she would learn, was her mother. In February 1977, Celena boarded a bus, leaving Los Angeles to enter a strange and private world where childhood was an experiment and no relationship was sacred. Immersed in the peculiar and violent society of the Synanon cult, Celena would spend the next five years subject to the unpredictable whims of Charles Dederich, the cult's shadowy leader.

SYNANON KID is the story of one girl’s search for identity and belonging throughout a childhood of physical, familial and racial displacement. From the African American communities of South Central, Los Angeles to the racially integrated, yet isolated world of Synanon, Celena struggles to navigate the dichotomy of the mainstream blue-collar life into which she was born and the counter-cultural lifestyle she inherited. Upon leaving the cult she is faced with further challenges of re-integrating into the mainstream nuclear-family lifestyle, and her new role of "being black" in a country where skin color matters.

At once humorous and disturbing, SYNANON KID is a coming-of-age story about hope, survival, and determination. It is the story of the unconditional love between a girl and her parents, and how that love helped her to grow and flourish despite the struggles presented by her estranged youth.

People who like memoirs, people who are interested in stories and biographies of cults, people who have lived in Synanon or knew someone who did, men and women who are forty-five years and older.

Please read through everything I have posted before submitting a design.
Be sure to look at the image files at the bottom and my notes!
6" x 9" trade back dimensions for book

Mood should be serious, contemplative, compelling

Look at images in file

The Synanon logo should be used as the first letter in the title of Synanon Kid

Synanon colors are red and black. If that is too intense, you can use other warm colors.

Two ideas I have for the cover:
1) Have a child with brown skin, very short hair, or bald in overalls profiled on the cover similar to how the image is displayed on the book Memoirs of a Geisha
2) A paper chain of children in overalls running through the center of the cover.

Please do not make the font look horrific, dripping letters etc. Not too cluttered with images. Do not use super bright red for the border. Slap dash stock photos with no real effort of original design. Thanks