Just finished the recent Bad Penny book

[conuly]

Two thoughts:

1. The author must have had "agouti" come up in his word-a-day calendar
2. Holy shit that ending. That just came the fuck out of nowhere.

Comments

[stardreamer]

"Agouti" is a word that a significant subset of people who have cats or rabbits as pets will know. (Mostly those who are nerds and delve into books meant for breeders.) It's the very mixed black/brown/grey/with-a-bit-of-white color that a lot of wild rabbits are, and which makes the background for the tabby striping on some tabby kitties. Most people who don't know the word will call it "grey" or "brown" instead, especially on cats, because those are the dominant colors. Some cats, such as Abyssinians, have a solid agouti variation.

[conuly]

Yes. It's not, however, a usual word for describing human hair color, certainly not three times in two chapters when the word wasn't used even once in the preceding four books and prequel.

[stardreamer]

Yikes! AFAIK, it's not even an accurate word for human hair color! So extra downchecks to the author for using a word without understanding what it means.

[conuly]

Theoretically it could be in this universe, since there's all superpowers and all, and lots of people don't look very (or even a little) human, but... yeah.