Spandex and the City

by Jenny T. Colgan

[Leah]

DNF.

I was liking this, I wasn't loving it then a few editing issues bugged me so I decided to put it down. The first was the fact Holly gets her computer hacked, so Ultimate Man can ask her out (because phones don't work??? IDK) and she goes to his house, wearing her "go-anywhere" black dress, somehow turns her phone off in the process after telling her housemate that if she doesn't hear from her by morning, she could call the police, and is then surprised to return home the next day, having stayed over at this strangers house, this vigilantes house, to find the police. And, apparently, despite no mention of a change of clothes, she's now magically wearing a red skirt. And it must literally just be a red skirt, because she was wearing a dress when she left. *Rages*

Then, the Internet dies. And it causes mass hysteria, because duh. Twenty years ago phones were just made for texting and calling, but the Internet dies and people forget how to function. ANYWAY. Holly states that the Internet was, since High School, part of her every waking minute. Holly is 26, and according to herself, she was 12 when the new Millennium came in, which means that she was in secondary school (because it was secondary school she attended, since she was in England before moving to America) from 1999-2003. The Internet was not that big of a thing during those years, at all. It's only really come to prominence with the invention of smartphones, the first of which wasn't even released until 2007 and likely didn't hit the mainstream til a bit after that. So it's physically impossible, unless Holly is lying about how old she was when the Millennium came in, to have the Internet as part of her every waking moment. Her phone in those years would have been a clunky Nokia, only capable of making phone calls and sending text messages and playing Snake. Computer lessons would have taken place maybe once or twice a week, and even then you would be making Powerpoint presentations or playing games.

I try not to get riled up. I know authors make mistakes, but I do get riled up. It does irritate me when authors can't properly age their characters appropriately, or assume that smartphones were a thing in the early 00s. When they have their character go out in one outfit, and somehow magically have an entirely different outfit on the next day (that she had been wearing for two days, no less, according to her flatmate?????).

It's just infuriating. It's even more so when you're the same age as the character, I'm actually younger, since in 2017 Holly would be 29 but this is all stuff I remember, this is stuff I am aware of which makes it worse when you read such silly things that are so easily proven inaccurate via Google (is that ironic?). This is why timelines are SO important. People just assume the Internet has been this thing we're addicted to forever, and yet, it wasn't back in the early 00s. In the early 00s, I don't even think WiFi was a thing, because you had to dial up with those horrible noises, etc. It's all so, so easy to disprove.

So, no. I wanted to like this book so much, especially because I love superhero shows. So I love the idea of a superhero romance book. It just needed to have its homework done properly. Or, if you don't want to have to do your homework properly, don't even mention stupid little takeaways like that, because it could have been lifted out without much notice, and I wouldn't have got all riled up.