A rose by any other name ...

Jay Mandal

Jay Mandal

Has any book you've read been spoilt by the character's name? If so, why was it a problem?

Tilly

Yes! The book I'm reading at the moment has a character called Rachel. Nothing wrong with that; it's a nice name, but other characters keep calling her "Rach". To me, this jars as much as a knife scraping on a plate. Eeeek!

Flick

I've been critiquing a story set in France in the 1820s and the heroine is a French girl called Julie! Finally the writer has decided to change it to Ava or Lily.

Jenny

We were watching Dad's Army on cable the other day and the verger called his wife "Tracey".

I know that Katherine Hepburn's character had that name in an old film, but there's no way it would have belonged to an elderly woman in an English seaside town in the 1940s!

Viv

I am reading a new book by Mina Ford, called Two of a Kind. It's about twins called Harriet and Hermione. The story jumps between their two stories as they are apart and have not met for 15 years, but somehow, as they both have names starting with the same letter, I keep mixing them up. A quarter of the way through and I still forget which one is which!

Carol

It would likely have been a surname, which then got used as a first name.
I'll give you an example;one of my hubby's 2x great-granmas. Her maiden surname was used as a middle name for the following four generations of males.
There were other side branches that sometimes did this as well.
The spelling of Tracey is not the usual 1970's onward Tracy.

Kangaroo

About a year or so ago, I was reading a book called 'The House of Windjammer'. It was set in 17th Century Amsterdam, from the point of view of Adam Windjammer (15years old) The setting details were well written, it felt right historically. The one thing I couldn't get over was the name of the girl that Adam likes. It was Jade. It drove me nuts.