I hate it when books do this

[petronella23]

• start by flinging you into the middle of a conversation or action scene where you don't know who anyone is

• keep swapping between past and present

What are your pet hates?

Is this Modern Divination? If not, sounds very similar to the issues that book has!

No. It was Legendborn (which is YA nonsense).

I suspect the issues I outlined are depressingly more common than you’d hope in recently written books.

Legendborn also has that ridiculous YA thing where the characters are all just so young and it doesn’t feel realistic that everyone is deferring to a teenager as their leader. But that’s standard for the category.

Yes this is YA too and sounds so similar, agree it’s prob quite common.

I hate:

• flashbacks
• dreams
• letters/diary entries used to avoid having to actually tell the story properly

Expository dialogue! My number one pet hate.

Number two, close behind, is authors (and subeditors, if such still exist) who can’t manage continuity. I’m reading Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series for the umpteenth time and she changes So Many Things. First Dot’s name is Bryant, then it’s Williams. First Jane is blonde-brown, then brown, then chestnut. Phryne’s first sexual experience is with Rene after the war, then it was with someone else. Phryne lives at 221B The Esplanade, St Kilda, but in one book she’s driving to her house in St Kilda Road (which does go through St Kilda but is emphatically not The Esplanade). Ember the cat goes from a six week old kitten to a grown cat when he’d only be about ten weeks old, and sometimes he’d a tom and sometimes neutered. She has the first winter storm hitting in July-August, extremely unlikely for Melbourne. Phryne is always on about how hard her childhood was and how she loves being rich but could get on perfectly well if she was cast out in the street in her petticoat (quoting Elizabeth I) - but when she goes undercover as a rider in a circus she falls apart away from all her belongings and staff.

Believe it or not I do like these books (when I’m in the right mood) but ermagerd Greenwood really needed an editor to make her fix these issues!

When the twist is something so random no one would ever think of it. I see you Sophie Hannah!!

Too many characters

No redeemable characters

Inconsistent timelines

Repeating the same point over and over. Looking at you DS

Gratuitous political agenda or violence

When a character tells another character somethng they already know, or should already know, as a means of informing the reader.

This annoys me too. Reminds of Shakespeare who was all "the King, my father". I think we all know that you know that the king is your father and we know it too. The King was a big deal. We know who the Prince is.

You get it in books as in
"Daisy, your great aunt and sister to Petunia, went on a trip up the Amazon where she first met David, later your great uncle. That's where she got the tribal amulet that maybe cursed" Enid told me.

Oh, and Massive Plot Holes, too. Reading The Green Mill Murder last night. Phryne flies in a Gipsy Moth plane to Talbotville, an extremely isolated hamlet in the Victorian Alps and very dangerous for flying. Then suddenly Charles, a wimpy murder suspect and complete townie, turns up. There is NO explanation of how he gets there. He doesn’t have a plane. It’s like he just stepped out of a train or car in his city suit. It makes zero sense, especially after pages and pages have been spent detailing all the preparations Phryne et al make for her flight (and more inconsistency there, too: she’s previously been a brilliant pilot, now suddenly she isn’t).

Older writers not knowing what the common understanding of younger generations is. So, PD James (born 1922) wrote a British character born in 1969 who didn't know/had forgotten who the Beatles were. Not a hermit or someone brought up on a remote island or anything.

Likewise Joanne Trollope writing a young female character who'd cut her hair short in the 80s and then surrounded herself with lots of pictures of women with long hair because she so regretted making herself 'ugly'. Mate... there's several possible ways to go with that but not the one you're imposing on that young woman.

Tbh I stopped reading both authors after that and it's not much loss.

Rape used as an excuse for the characters traumatic past/excuse to traumatize the character.

Just don't. It's fucking lazy and frankly, insulting.

Yes I fucking hate this

It's probably the publisher's house style rather than the author. Some like you to italicize the first use of any foreign word, and then not italicize. Others want any foreign word always in italics.

I'm glad you pointed this out. Second lieutenants had a particularly bad life expectancy.

I'm reading "the mercies" at the moment and as soon as I see a letter page I immediately feel sleepy. I barely read them, I just can't be bothered and the style of the letter is different to the rest of the book so it just doesn't fit.

@Hungrycaterpillarsmummy I just read The Girl Who Came Home and skimmed the letters. It's just so lazy writing that way.

Sort of related - I hate loads of passages printed in italics - usually
poetry, songs (looking at you, Tolkien) or diary entries. I just find it really hard to read. I skipped the vast majority of the songs in LOTR!

Treating croissant as a foreign word is ridiculous. It’s very clearly a loan word that is now part of standard English.

A style guide that italicises croissant is overzealous.

I suspect that most readers skipped the long passages of songs and poetry in LOTR. I certainly did.

How many of those who made it through War and Peace to the (frankly dreadful) epilogue have done so by skipping the dreary philosophising on the events and people of the time? If I wanted to read that I’d be reading 1812 issues of The Times. 😂

Shakespeare at least had a reason because actors used to play multiple parts in the same play.

When one book turns out to be a hook and just the first of a string of books. When it's written like that, with an eye on the main chance, it's never as well written.

Shakespeare at least had a reason because actors used to play multiple parts in the same play

No he didn't because I'm talking about identifying who the person is to another character who would know it already not identifying the specific character in front of them or the actor playing it.

It still helped the audience :)

I agree.

I have long loathed the current fad for writing novels in the historic present. It seems childish in style to me, like the Rupert Bear annuals I used to get for Christmas as a kid.