I just finished reading a book that both my mother and my friend Becky recommended, but I need to grouse about it a little bit here. It was mostly set in the Chicago area, but the author was just making stuff up about Chicago geography. There is no single bus that goes between two important locations in her story, so it's a fairly hefty commute. But she is constantly having her characters zip from Point A to Point B on one effortless bus. She has them take walks that would require multiple hours in Chicago, while also describing a 1.5-mile walk in NYC as substantial. (She lives in NYC.) She invents a hospital that is a convenient distance from O'Hare, Pilsen, and Evanston, and also close enough to the lake for an ambulance to go straight there in an emergency. Oh, and O'Hare is not included in the city in her fictional map.
Big chunks of the book are set at my undergrad alma mater, and everything about it is wrong: ev.er.y.thing. In the acknowledgments she thanks the university librarians for helping her investigate academic programs from the 80s, but she seems to have blithely disregarded what they told her.
I'm not including the name of the book in this post because I wouldn't want the author to stumble across it. The setting is rarely the most important part of a book; she did a respectable job with the characters and the plot and the writing. Probably only a small fraction of her audience is likely to be attempting to superimpose her fictional campus buildings on an actual mental map. But on behalf of that small fraction I have to say: it's super-distracting.
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