Reviews tagging 'Domestic abuse'

Geneva by Richard Armitage

1 review

ksmo's review

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I thought this book was alright - I was tempted to DNF a couple of times, but I stuck with it because it was an audiobook and things got a bit more interesting. The storyline is quite outlandish, I must say, but I was generally entertained.

As someone who lives in Switzerland, there are a few things in this book that drove me absolutely nuts.
  1. They spend the whole book using Euros. That's not the currency of Switzerland. That's like taking Canadian dollars to the US - sure, maybe some places near the border will accept with a bad exchange rate, but you've got the wrong currency! Come on, bare minimum of research when setting a book in another country.
  2. The book is set in Geneva, i.e. very much in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Yet a lot of interactions are framed as though Switzerland is a random gamble of which language people will speak - Daniel tries a couple of words of French, but gets basic one-word responses in German. I guarantee you that the vast majority of people you try to speak to in Geneva will speak French over German, at a minimum on the level of 'merci' 'de rien/avec plaisir' etc.
  3. Sarah gets stressed at an event at the institute in Geneva and pushes open a door labelled 'Ausfahrt'. Alas, that means its an exit for cars, and it wouldn't be a person-sized standard door. They literally just Google translated 'exit', but it should be labelled Ausgang. But also, they're in the French-speaking region, so it should say Sortie.
  4. There are a lot of references to the frozen lake, and driving on mountain passes covered in snow. We're not suicidal - either the snow is cleared from the road or it's closed. I'll let him off on questions of climate change and if it even gets that cold anymore.
  5. They specifically put in effort to spell out www.sbb.ch, which is indeed the correct website for Swiss trains, and then made up an IC10__, when they could have just stuck with IC1 and been correct.
I know people will think I'm being pedantic and ridiculous, but these moments just took me out of the book. If you're going to specifically use real locations and try to point out minute details, at least get them right! I thought they did quite well with physical positioning of landmarks around Geneva and moving between them, but they seemed to end their efforts at browsing Google maps. If you're going to specifically tell me which statue in a park someone is stood next to and what is written on the plaque that they're reading, at least extend the Googling to also check the currency of the country the book is set in.
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