I’m looking for a place to do a small rant and I picked this place, but by all means let me know if this is not allowed. I’ll formulate a question at the end for some group venting!
Extemely mild, almost irrelevant spoiler ahead for the Atlas Complex by Olivie Blake
I think we’ve all encountered a time where it’s clear that you know more about something than the author does. Normally for me this is something about neuroscience, but I didn’t expect it this time to simply be a city in my country? Because I don’t think Olivie Blake knows what The Hague is…
In the book, an extremely minor event takes place at the International Criminal Court, which is located in the city of the Hague in the Netherlands. However, most people might be more familiar with the term ‘to be tried at The Hague’. And I think maybe people think that the ‘Hague’ is the institute or even just building instead of the, you know, city it’s in.
So this book uses the two following phrases: ‘in the crowd outside the Hague’ and ‘What happened at the Hague’. Now, I am no native speaker, but replace those with Paris and the sentences sound extremely wrong. The Hague is very much treated like a non-city noun in these phrases.
It was only these two sentences, it wasn’t relevant to the plot, yet it infuriated me enough to come here and talk about it. Because how did no one spot this? Not one editor or beta reader? So simple yet so frustrating
And now, to turn this into a group experience: what have you encountered in a book that you knew to be so extremely wrong that it needlessly frustrated you to the point of having to put the book down for a bit? Let me know!
by maaikelcera