Past This Point - Nicole Mabry

I've been enjoying this book, if occasionally being made to sob as someone dies counts as enjoyment. I've become quite engaged with the main character (although  I'd assumed she was late-twenties not late-thirties) but I've just been bumped out of the story a little by some details that don't work.

 

Our heroine has now met an Englishman and they've reached a point where they're trading backgrounds. It's mostly well done and I was reading along smoothly when the details of the Englishman's life stopped working.

 

He's from a wealthy hotelier family. He describes himself as spending weekends at "our country house" in Surrey. Someone brought up to this lifestyle would be more like to say "our house in the country". Then he says that when the weather was nice:

 

"My father and I would fish and hunt ducks".

 

I can imagine the fishing but duck hunting in Surrey is extremely unlikely. It's illegal to shoot at ducks in the UK unless you're shooting at a flight, which would normally be around dawn. You only get flights of ducks in much wilder, less densely populated counties than Surrey. If you were going hunting with a gun, it would be more likely that you'd be culling deer.

 

Then, presumably to show his humane side, he talks about changing the way his parents bought dogs. He says:

 

"I refused to allow my parents to buy the purebreds they’d always gotten before."

 

The English don't buy purebred dogs. They buy pedigree dogs and this use of "gotten" is at best Transatlantic English.

 

This is all small stuff and not at all important to the story BUT, if you choose to use a character from another country then it's best if you pick one you're familiar with or get someone who comes from there to guide you.

 

When I first went to the US, I was amazed at how poorly reading books and watching movies had prepared me for the reality of day to day life and at how much that day to day life varied according to the State I was in.  The difference in the use of language in two English speaking countries is enormous but the difference in the things they take for granted about what they do in their time off is a chasm that it's hard to cross, partly because you only notice it when you fall into it.