Hate when authors do this

[thinkponk48]

Don't get characters ages correct. In the book I'm reading a female character has been to university, worked as a teacher for a bit, met married and bought a house with someone and then had a child.

Eventually her son moves abroad for a job and she's an empty nester at 38! So ridiculous should be at least 45.

I know it's a silly thing but it's ruined the book for me

Grandad’s war memories do it for me. Contemporary novels where the characters are in their 20’s but chat with family members who were adults in WW2. Yes, you get late babies etc but I can help do the sums and then it just annoys me.

I feel like Dean is one of the most normal names.

Dudley though!

Check your maths 😂
Also sorry to be that person but unless it’s changed, you can’t be a qualified teacher that quickly.

If it's any consolation, the American characters in the BBC Radio adaptations of Agatha Christie always sound like James Cagney. Even the women.

Brain fart! Maths is definitely out! Whoops! I shouldn't try to engage in mental activity after work.

But yes, you can be a qualified teacher at 21 if you do a BA Ed.

Why was Dean a weird name for that period?

Why? My friends mum, similar age is called Alys.
We love the Slough House books, but there’s a pretty significant slip up in the first book that the whole reason that River Cartwright is in the Slow Horses hangs on.

Harry’s year group are supposed to be born in 1979/1980 (I think) so Dean is probably quite normal for that era?

Still find it weird that Harry’s parents died when they were 21.

The Harry Potter books are set in the mid 90s, JKR has talked about it a few times iirc.

Dean was totally normal for that period (not so sure about Harry, Ron and hermione though!) but you also need to remember that when people write,they choose names that feel right for the period. Dean is a very 90s-esque boy band type name.

I hate this one as well. Upper class English women called Sheridan. Women in their 70s now, so born in the 1940s, called Doris.

The first Harry Potter came out when I was going into year 6 and for the next few he and I were effectively the 'same age'. I knew and know several Deans my age, that name doesn't stand out at all! Probably even less so if HP was all meant to be set earlier in the 90s.

I went to school with 3 Deans born in the 80's

I have been to Alaska on a cruise and lots of salmon was there to spawn and we went and watched bears too in same area, playing around in reserves, trying to get fish in the rivers .

So I think that one is true?

Not as much as Harry apparently flying round on a toy broomstick at 1 year old 😂

Just here to join in with the ‘yep, Dean is a common male name’ chorus, particularly in certain social circles. At least two in my year group born in the early 90s, familiar with deans who are now 55, 45, 35 and 25. Id say it’s dropped off in popularity in births from the late 90s.

In Victoria Hislop's The Return (awful book, don't bother) there is a character who is a young woman during the Spanish Civil War (early 1930s), so must've been born latest around 1915. She then goes on to have a DD who is a young woman in the early 21st century - so would've been born around 1980! There is another huge problem also, with someone's name change. That was the worse one but I do remember reading a book where a woman is wearing a glamorous backless evening gown and then turns her collar up - technically possible, I suppose, but sounds more like a raincoat!

In the book Timeline the author said the language occitan didn't exist any more.....bugger me, they have dictation competitions in it where I live. Nobody told the Limousin.

Possibly misremembering, but in a Horowitz book he talks of a Leeds vs Arsenal match. But the match is in London, so it should have been Arsenal vs Leeds. That really annoyed me, but maybe it was on purpose as the ‘fictional’ book was supposed to have some clangers in there on purpose.

Also, to echo others, why do the majority of ‘women’s’ fiction books have the lead working as a frustrated novelist, working in marketing, shop owner, etc. why can’t we have scientists, architects, engineers, doctors, etc. a lot of the husbands have those jobs, so they obviously know about them, or could do a bit of research.

In every book I've ever read where someone is barefoot they are described as 'padding'. It boils my piss something awful and I have to stifle the impulse to chuck it at the wall.

Same, we had four Deans all born after 1986 and before 1990!

Not in January though

Obviously not exactly literally true - there were 539 Samanthas living in England and Wales in 1938, excluding very small children - but yes to the general point that out of period names jar even if not absolutely impossible. A book I read recently set just after WW2 gave a British Establishment type children born in the 1930s named Wendel and Lorraine, but then it also had them taking holidays in 'the Lake Country' and a host of other things that annoyed the heck out of me.

Maths not your strong point @Itstarts ?

As someone with a publishing background, I just to defend the copyeditor and proofreader a bit. You think they were poor, but you have no idea how many other things that did pick up. It's not an easy job, especially if a manuscript is in poor shape to begin with. It doesn't pay especially well (publishing in general is low paid) and they are freelance and do what they can within the time they're given. It's also not the case that what the copyeditor and proofreader say goes. There's the publisher, the author, marketing etc. who will all be having a say. Indeed I would expect the publisher may well have pointed this fundamental issue out but the author refused to change it. Overriding them could wreck the working relationship - it's not an easy line to tread at all.