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

There was a whole thread about this a couple of days ago !

@Bideshi I'm with you on the names. I recently read a story which was generally good but had all the characters named very strangely for the setting (Regency England, upper class). I don't know if the author is American or what but it really jarred. I think most of the names technically existed then in places such as Greek mythology but based on my family and social history research I would say they were not at all the norm. Things such as Barbara and Lewis. Almost everyone then was a William/Edward/George or Elizabeth/Mary/Charlotte. Also Americanisms. Another really good story was full of them despite being set across various periods in UK history. I don't remember anyone saying things like elevator, sneakers or airplane when I was younger.

Worryingly it is!

Fair enough. I’m not au fait with the world of publishing.

Huh? Confused about what you mean by HP names? There aren't many muggles even named in the books - Dean wasn't a muggle, he was a wizard? Even if you mean muggleborn, he would have been born 1980-1981. Dean was in the top 40 boys names in the UK throughout the 70s-90s so a completely appropriate name. I was born late 80s and had a Dean in my class.
www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/articles/babynamessince1904howhasyoursperformed/2016-09-02
Same with the other muggle characters - vernon and petunia would have been perfectly normal names for people born in the 1950s.

Names can be outliers in almost any direction, and don't always fit with what people incorrectly assume about time periods - e.g. Chloe, Candace, Bernice, Jemima, Lydia, Priscilla all sound quite modern but are thousands of years old.

The most unrealistic naming convention in books/tv/films is there are never any duplicate names. Harry Potter should have been awash with 'Wait is it Harry P or Harry D that's the heir of Slytherin?' 'Are you talking about Gryffindor George or Ravenclaw George?' etc.

I was born in 86 and had two Dean's in my small village primary school class.

Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls had teenagers in the mid/late 1990s with names like Colin and Tracey. Couldn't get past this, it bothered me all the way through the book!

I had a neighbour called Colin. He must have been born around 1995.

I would have been a teenager in the mid / late 90s and there were at least three girls called Tracey in my year group.

I recently read a book in which two of the main characters were in their 30s during world war 2 then met up in the modern day.

There were descriptions of them running along beaches etc when in reality they would have been well into their hundreds by this point and probably not capable of that.

It's like the author didn't work out the maths.

Fair enough, I can't remember all the names in the book but they generally jarred and weren't right for the time. My school year was full of Tom, Mark, Ben, Chris, Richard, Matt, Lisa, Catherine, Laura etc (teenager in 90s)

Slightly niche but as a country girl it’s really annoying how many writers can’t write farmers, farm workers or gamekeepers properly. Maybe it doesn’t take from a story if you don’t know but it really jars with me when writers seem to have used Emmerdale as research.

The reverse is also true. British writers sometimes make mistakes in dialogue with American characters. A common one is using for example "Californian" or "Texan" as an adjective where an American would use the noun form as an adjective. Americans will say "He is a Texan," but they would say "He has a Texas accent."

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

British TV series from the 60-70s are really bad for fake American accents. Almost always too heavy on the rhotic "r" in particular. It no longer seems to be an issue; either better dialogue coaches or more actual American actors available in the UK to play the parts.

Were you there in January burnoutbabe? I'm fine with all of that happening, but shouldn't it be late spring through to early autumn, not January. It's the time of year that's the issue. And there was no reason that required the story to be set in January, the crime part of the plot could have taken place at anytime of the year.

Haha that's brilliant @thinkponk48 ... I'm that age and that sounds pretty close to my experience of adulthood, I had my eldest at the below average age of 28 when I had been working as a teacher for six years... obviously now, with me aged 38, she's 10! So unless she was some super-prodigy sent off to uni in year 5 (and either my only or youngest kid) it would be pretty hard for me to be an empty-nester. Terrible, glaring error.

Sh yes I missed that January aspect (I went. August)

So I suppose it's easily done. I read 5 lines and missed the "obvious' even with someone saying it was odd.

Imagine that as one paragraph in say a 1000 page book!

I always thought the bizarre bit in Harry Potter was that his parents had him and then died in their early 20s, but James Potter had no parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins, basically not a single relative left who could care for his small child. What disaster had befallen the family previously?

I once read a - traditionally published - book that was so horrendous that I went through the entire thing and noted every single continuity, spelling and grammatical error then sent an email to the publisher listing every one. There was on average 1.8 errors per page. The only thing I remember now was the regular references to Alan Titschmarsh.

I found Joseph Coggs staying perpetually young like Bart Simpson more annoying.

Maybe there was a portrait of him in the attic of Miss Clare's cottage?

I read one on mat leave with ds (11). The dog in the book changed from a black lab to a collie. Still annoyed about it now!

Bridget Jones’s Baby the book bore no relation to the film of the same name. And I hate to tell you…but she’s writing a fourth film.

They totally don’t know anything about those professions, except husbands working in those roles are “a good catch”!

The odd time they do try to portray female doctors they have an absolutely bonkers idea of what we do all day. It’s always a surgeon not a physician, and they are always saving lives by taking dramatic risks, never just signing off clinic letters or sitting in a governance meeting

James Potter was a massive twat in the books. Maybe his whole family had gone NC?

*Bridget

(Apologies, I'm an editor/proofreader and this thread has triggered me 🤣)

Sadly my job has ruined a lot of reading for me because all I do is spot the names spelled differently on different pages, names that don't go with the era (read one recently with teenagers called Gary and Sue), typos and punctuation errors, especially errant apostrophes and misplaced commas - so many authors love to splice their commas and dangle their modifiers - etc. It's maddening to not be able to just enjoy a bit of light reading!