jinian | nonsense of place

I just finished Girl Wonder by Alexa Martin, a decent YA novel about a girl who moves to a horrible new school for senior year. Strangely it almost manages to be a novel about the infidelity of middle-aged male novelists and professors (her parents), but I was reasonably entertained. My problem with it, apart from the disappearance of the gays (dear author, there is a reason that Capitol Hill is Seattle's most interesting and fashionable neighborhood), is the total inconsistency of setting.

For instance, Girl and Girl Wonder are at "an office supply store just a short ways from [Seattle University's] campus" and start talking about a Walmart "across the street." Um, no. There is no Walmart here. People who live in Seattle know that. You would have to go to at least 20 minutes on the highway. I get that they needed a morally acceptable place to practice shoplifting, but you can't put your characters into a real setting and then plunk down highly specific, emotionally charged features that don't exist. I am willing to spot you an office supply store, but not a Walmart; a snooty private school, but not the large, awful high school with no academic or behavioral standards except for the separate enclave housing the monolithic gifted program (wtf?).

There are good points about the book, like when she has a bunch of sex and nothing awful happens, but her empowerment at the end largely consists of picking someone new to obey. (Also the whole novel kind of winds up being propaganda for Evergreen, our state's hippie school, which I'm sure is a fine establishment of alternative education but is also the butt of many jokes. What?)

I've had lesser but sometimes disconcerting place problems in this direction with C.E. Murphy's Walker Papers series. Mostly the Seattle in them is good, but every so often there's a feature missing or out of place, likely because the author moved away some years ago. I don't mean hydrological features appearing due to in-series cataclysms, but things like the Kingdome still being there. I'm sorry, it has gone, and some of us have even had long enough to come to terms with that. Will beta read for... er, nothing really, reading is good.

So, how do writers screw up when it comes to your home town?