Okay, I was sent a copy of this that said "Advance Reading Copy" on the front and "Uncorrected Proof" on the back, so I'm not going to complain about the typical formatting and language mistakes, and typos, that I saw in the book. With luck, they'll have caught the weird line breaks or paragraph breaks, the bits of dialogue where a short remark and someone else's answer appear in the same line or paragraph, the quotation that ends with -- I think it was a greater-than symbol? -- rather than a quotation mark, or the weird short sentence on the first page of one chapter where the wording or the tense had been changed, yet both words remained so that the sentence became gibberish. I don't know why a book that was already published in England, I think, would have any of these kinds of mistakes, but, okay, they'll probably correct them. Or not. Even if they're left untouched, I don't particularly care.
I'm just super-annoyed that a line that was obviously originally about English "public schools" was evidently changed by some dippy, officious young editor in New York. The line was about how a character went to a school, "the kind of public school whose name is prefixed with the word 'minor.'" And for us dumb Americans the officious editor changed "public school" to "private school," which, if you don't know, is incomparably stupid. "Minor public school" as a reference to second-string elite British boarding schools is a well-known phrase that conveys a world of knowledge about just who you're dealing with, but "minor private school" isn't even "a thing." Duuuh.... You just know that some busybody young New York City editor, full of pride at having gone to some Seven Sisters school or some other liberal-arts college, and totally full of herself for knowing the term "public school" which she totally, totally didn't know back when she was in high school or middle school, felt that she had to rescue her fellow ignorant, benighted American citizens.
Why do editors in the U.S. -- and in the U.K. -- have to pull these kinds of dumb stunts? I'm an educated American. I understand pretty much everything I need to understand in British books. And I'm sure the same goes for educated British people reading American books. Why do they have to justify their existences by fiddling with this book or with the Harry Potter books? At least with the Harry Potter books you maybe don't want to confuse children with British spellings, but who do they think the audience for this book is? People who don't know the term "public school" rather than people with basic educations??
And the book still had a reference to "petrol" or somesuch. I mean, criminy.
Anyway, this book is a good light literary romance or bildungsroman. I enjoyed it pretty well! I was afraid some things would turn out quite badly because of our hero's foolishness, but they didn't turn out *too* badly....
I'm just super-annoyed that a line that was obviously originally about English "public schools" was evidently changed by some dippy, officious young editor in New York. The line was about how a character went to a school, "the kind of public school whose name is prefixed with the word 'minor.'" And for us dumb Americans the officious editor changed "public school" to "private school," which, if you don't know, is incomparably stupid. "Minor public school" as a reference to second-string elite British boarding schools is a well-known phrase that conveys a world of knowledge about just who you're dealing with, but "minor private school" isn't even "a thing." Duuuh.... You just know that some busybody young New York City editor, full of pride at having gone to some Seven Sisters school or some other liberal-arts college, and totally full of herself for knowing the term "public school" which she totally, totally didn't know back when she was in high school or middle school, felt that she had to rescue her fellow ignorant, benighted American citizens.
Why do editors in the U.S. -- and in the U.K. -- have to pull these kinds of dumb stunts? I'm an educated American. I understand pretty much everything I need to understand in British books. And I'm sure the same goes for educated British people reading American books. Why do they have to justify their existences by fiddling with this book or with the Harry Potter books? At least with the Harry Potter books you maybe don't want to confuse children with British spellings, but who do they think the audience for this book is? People who don't know the term "public school" rather than people with basic educations??
And the book still had a reference to "petrol" or somesuch. I mean, criminy.
Anyway, this book is a good light literary romance or bildungsroman. I enjoyed it pretty well! I was afraid some things would turn out quite badly because of our hero's foolishness, but they didn't turn out *too* badly....