nit picking

[appomattoxco]

I picked up a romance by Susan Andersen the other day to read between customers. It was pretty good but I kept being annoyed by the American characters slipping into British accents. It was just off putting to hear a character use "y'all" and then call the trunk of her car the boot. This is the third book I've read by her and in each one there's a bunch of these slips. The plots are fun and funny but voices are always off. She likes her characters to sound "regional' she over does the American slang for wherever then she drops it altogether and they sound English. She's a best seller so I guess I'm being more picky than I should be. I could forgive the ocassional "bloody hell" as a melting pot thing but boots, lifts and loos coming out of American mouths pulls me out of the story. I and the other fic writers I know work so hard to avoid this kind of thing that seeing it in something published just irks me.