Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Such glowing reviews, so many stars, so disappointed. The writer lives in England and if he had set his story there I might have more enthralled with his prose. The novel is, instead, set in a town in California near the Pacific Coast. Mr Whittaker's grasp of American English definitely needed a fact checker since there are quite a few jarring mistakes that kept diverting my attention from the plot. Americans, at least in California, do not call a 6 pack of beer a 'sixer', or refer to mustard as 'French's', or hot dogs, or franks as 'frankfurters'. Women in California do not 'fall pregnant'. they get pregnant. In California we turn off the TV or turn off the garden hose, Mr. Whittaker's characters 'cut the TV' and 'cut the hose'. He refers to a cute town as looking as though it had been 'lifted from Anaheim', does he mean Disneyland? Kids who ride up on their bikes rest their hand on their 'Stelbers', pray, what ARE Stelbers? In California no small towns have a 'butcher's' as a separate shop, butcher's are in larger-or sometimes smaller- markets. If these people live near Salinas, as he purports, they would not be talking about the baseball team the Angels, but about the Giants. His place and street names are laughably non-Californian-Cape Haven, Bitterwater, Vermont, Pensacola-and I'm only on page 38. A deer would never be roaming 'the Mendocino' which first of all is a long way from Salinas, and is the name of a County in the State, as well as a town in the County of Mendocino, and while there might be deer in Mendocino there is NO area ever referred to as 'the Mendocino'. If Walk is traveling 100 miles from the area near Salinas to the prison to pick up Vincent he would be nowhere near the town of Hanford, and there is no 'Central Valley Highway' anywhere in the state. I've gotten as far as page 65 and have just noticed he has a street named Cassidy and a young girl who torments Duchess also named Cassidy...oh, and there is a character named 'Dickie Darke'...seriously?. I'm sorry, I can't continue to read this; why oh why did his publisher not have an editor check these things, and why oh why did the author not place this perhaps intriguing novel in a setting and country with which he was familiar? Sadly, on page 72 my journey with Star, Duchess, and Walk is over.