The wrong era names....gaargh

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I'm reading a book set in the present time. The young teenagers are called Andrea and Janet. It's so confusing as I keep thinking these are the mothers not the daughters. I'm 40 and don't know a Janet or Andrea my age, let alone 25 years younger. Why do authors do this?

Stephen King does this a lot, all his teenage and twentysomething characters are stuck in 1962 name-wise. Plus 90% of the adult female characters are housewives who got married after college

I'm in my early 40s and went to school with many Andreas. No Janet though.

I know one Andrea who’s around 40.
And a quick look at the Darkgreener baby name site shows that there’s been some baby Andrea’s and baby Janet’s each year since 1996. Although they’re way, way, way down the list when it comes to the most popular baby names.

But I’d agree that the vast majority of Andrea’s and Janet’s out there are older women.

I can cope with the occasional anachronistic name in novels, but when there’s a novel full of them it can be a bit much.

The odd anachronistic one is fine - there are always a few named for a grandmother or neighbour or someone. But I agree, if they're all out of time, it does jar, and a group of names does tend to suggest a particular time far more than one by itself.

God yes. I can’t think of them off the top of my head but YES.

(And all their husbands in blue chambray work shirts).

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep? Or maybe vice versa?

I think the girls were meant to be born in late 60s Lancashire, so they'd have to be very early adopters. I'd expect one of them to be Ann, Cathy, Helen, Sarah, Sue or Julie.

@Kilopascal Yes that's the one! It was a good book but the girls names annoyed me more than they should!

I think the occasional out-of-generation name is fine because some families like to name babies after older family members, but it's off-putting if most of the characters are 'wrongly' named.

@LividHot Wendy Torrance, Rachel Creed (Pet Sematary), Donna Trenton (Cujo) admittedly 70s/80s ones, but surely a woman working outside the home wouldn't have been unusual even if she had children. I just re-read Dr Sleep which was published in 2013 and I couldn't find a mention of what Lucy Stone does for a living. Joanna Noonan from Bag of Bones spends her time sitting on charity boards despite a college degree.

I really noticed the names thing when I read The Outsider (2018) where a character has two teenage daughters. Annoyingly I can't remember what they were called but it was enough to send me down an internet rabbit hole of American baby girls names from 2004 to 2006! In the TV miniseries they were renamed Maya and Jessa which seemed much more appropriate.

Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix is a very successful 19 year old British diver.

The odd one works - in that I know a teenage Laura and a teenage Clare, but both are named after departed relatives /friends of parents who would have been 40-somethings.

several in the same book is annoying.

and yes, the other way annoys me too - middle aged Paris is a good example, another was a 50-something Elsie - Elsie is either born pre-WWII or is under 10.

Although her father is French and mother Italian so not the same.

The (real life) sisters Grace and Tilly born in the 80s is a different kettle of fish to characters called Grace and Tilly who would surely have been born in, at least the seventies?

Isn't there a thing called the Tiffany problem. In that Tiffany is a 10th century name. But if I wrote a book set in 1066 with a lead female character called Tiffany people would be complaining how unrealistic it was.

@whosaidtha I have a 1950s version of Robin Hood which my father had as a boy, and one of the female characters is called Dame Tiphanië. It took me ages to work out the pronunciation 🤣

I know 2 Andreas who are currently in their 30's. I don't think Andrea is that unusual at all. Janet is stretching it a little bit but still not "out there".

Not everyone names their children from the current top 100!

I read a Jane Fallon book set now with a young woman in her early twenties called Sharon. So lazy. She was a salt of the earth working class type which is all very well, she would not have been called Sharon.

I’m 43 and went to school with 2 Andreas and either 2 or 3 Janets.

Thye other annoyance is that Scottish characters all have to be called clichéd Scottish names like Angus, Hamish, Morag, Flora etc. There are undoubtedly plenty of those in Scotland, but it's so lazy to assume no one in Scotland is called Karen or Sarah or Olivia or Eva.

In my mind, a stereotypical group of Scottish women over 40 would be called Susan, Kirsty, Karen and Moira.

Slightly different, but I remember reading this blog post by an amateur author (no one would have heard of her, I came across her via another forum where the main point of discussion was her being religiously conservative). She was writing a book set in about 1913, where the main character (a man) was called Jaeryn!! And she did a “character interview” with him, where he talked about what “clique” he was in at school. It was so obvious she’d barely done any proper research; Jaeryn would be a weird name in 2023 let alone 1913, and the concept of “school cliques” just doesn’t exist in Britain (where the guy was supposed to be from). And by cliques I mean the kind of thing that’s always talked about in American high school films eg jocks/nerds/social outcasts etc.
If I was going to write a story set in 1913 I would google “popular 1910s names”. It’s not hard.

I read a Regency romance where the Duke of Wherever was called Wayne.

I also get quite wound up by (usually) American authors writing a novel set in Ireland and naming characters using American-Irish names which often don't really exist in Ireland, like Carrick. Mind you, Sally Rooney used the name Connell and if I didn't know that she was Irish I would have assumed that it was also an American-Irish name.

Gracie and Sarah. I didn't think there was a problem with those though!

@BlackAmericanoNoSugar My (Irish) friend has a cat called Carrick.