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

I thought Harry Potter was living with his relations? Aren’t Lily and Petunia sisters?

Yes but they’re muggle relations. I never understood why James didn’t have a single relation on his side.
I’ve never heard that canon before about James and his parents. That’s not in the book is it? I feel sure I would remember it after reading them a few times myself and with the kids!

I'm 41 and was at school with a few Freyas and a Poppy...

It was mostly about Ivan’s death. In one book it says he died on honeymoon, drowning by swimming to retrieve Pauline’s sunglasses. However, at the end of ‘The Cappuccino Years’ (I think), both sets of parents are back with their original spouses.

George also originally was in hospital due to falling off a ladder, he then contracted a hospital infection. However, in the last book, Adrian says he had 2 strokes which were caused by his unhealthy lifestyle.

For some reason, Sue Townsend moved the setting to Ashby-de-la-Zouch rather than Leicester. Not unreasonable that Adrian’s parents moved but all of their friends, schoolmates, actual school were also transplanted along with them!

I've just finished Seven Days by Alex Lake. In the opening chapter there's a scene of a man stealing a child, he offers to take him for ice cream. Then half way through the exact same scene is described but this time he attacks the mother and grabs the child. I have no idea how that got missed in editing. I hate it when authors use the wrong name too.

Speaking of Still Life - one of the characters, who was a middle aged woman during the war, spoke about watching Disney’s Pinocchio, which was released in 1940, as a child.

And it’s not a continuity error, but what was with that fucking sentient parrot?

People taking the wrong tube line, or getting off at the wrong stop for books set in London. They do this in films too, you see them cross the river south, only to find them in North London.

I believe the dragon pox bit is on Pottermore. I think lily's parents died in some sort of accident.

I understand Lily and James having a baby young in the war... but Petunia marrying young seems a little odd. Wouldn't she have gone to university in the 80s?

In the 80s far fewer people went to university than these days.
I had assumed James' family all died in the wizarding conflicts.
Even if he had had relations though, wouldn't he still have been placed with the Dursleys for anonymity & safety growing up?

The "blood protection" was based on Lily not James...

A lot of my friend's older sisters were having babies, getting married or opting for little jobs at 19/20 with a view to getting married by 21/22 and having their first baby in the 80s. The mean age for first births when married in the 70s when they were growing up (so expectations were formed) was 23-24, so younger than that wasn't particularly unusual - and it was very possible for you to get perfectly good jobs at 16 or 18 without any requirement for a degree. Add to that there was still pressure to get married if somebody accidentally got pregnant - it wasn't as unusual as people tend to think now.

Not only was it rubbish it was a lazy rewrite of The Island from a supposedly different point of view. I quite enjoyed The Island of Spiralonga island really existed and I didn't know about it.

But in the UK it's a licence. American spelling unless in American books is one of the things that annoys me.

I liked the book and didn't try to hard to make things 'add up' but the parrot was a stupid idea.

I've just finished a book where (one of) the killers was an investigating police officer, which is always a lazy trope, but to make matters worse she was operating in a fugue state with no knowledge of what she was doing.
Bah!

Re: the name Samantha having been around for literally centuries, I read that the name Tiffany was also around in the Middle Ages, but no writer will use it in a historical novel because even if it's not unrealistic, it sounds ridiculous.

I hate the fact that every heroine in a thriller is called Kate. In fact when I see that it makes me think less of the author for being so unoriginal.

Which Bridget Jones book has the love interest that resembled Daniel Craig? I remember he made a little joke about James Bond that made no sense in the context of the book and it was sooo obvious Helen Fielding was picturing it all on a cinema screen

Not a book, but do any of you remember the TV series Dynasty with British actresses Joan Collins and Stephanie Beecham. They were supposed to be from the English upper class but had names Alexis and Sable ffs!!
I always thought Sable should really have been named Sybil. Much more realistic.
Surely the actresses could have told the producers no one had those names in UK at that time.

Peter Robinson is bad on names, and understanding life in England in the 2000's. He left the UK decades ago and it shows, names and social mores relate to how things were years ago. Eg a woman working in a travel agent refers to her boss as "Mr Smith" not "John".

I thought the Poisonwood Bible was a brilliant book. But then, in the later part of the book, people take train from Johannesburg to to to the beach for the day, for a picnic or something. It's about 18 hours by train to the nearest beach...

Sorry re my typos!

One of those girl in a window on a train type books had a plot that hinged on a dodgy police officer who, due to his work in the metropolitan police, had access to a special skeleton key that could allow him to effortlessly break into any building.

Yep…the Met only use those massive battering rams on drug raids for kicks.

Ozgirl75

Its on J K Rowling’s Wizarding World site. There is loads of backstory about many characters and things from the books, all direct from J K. Total geek 😊

I read a book a while back set in the first world war. they kept having spam sandwiches, odd as it wasn't invented until 1937

We have tornadoes in Florida, as well as hurricanes. We even have a desigated interior room in our house to take cover in the event of a tornado warning.

My pet hate is when an author decides to set part of their book in, and create a character from, a city they’ve never been to. They might have visited to do some light research, see a few tourist sights that nobody who actually LIVES there ever does and then writes about the city and citizens like their weekend visit is the authentic lived experience.

Anita Shrieve in The Pilot’s Wife and Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code are particularly bad for this when they write about my patches of London. Both made errors that me want to scream. Plus, they write like they are sitting with a London A-Z next to them.