I think I may have seen something in /r/whatsthatbook more baffling than

[conuly]

"It's set in a time when things were hard for black people in America" - a line which so flabbergasted me that I don't think I ever figured out what to say.

But this one may have topped it!

"The story is about a black girl, somewhere between 8 and 16 years old, from a black family."

...I'm dying to ask why they think they need to specify that this girl is the same race as everybody else in her family, when that's usually how this works. There's no indication in the rest of the post that we might have reason to think she's not.

Comments

[halfshellvenus]

Plus, somewhere between 8 and 16 years old? There are, like, 4-5 developmental stages across that range. Doesn't the author know how old their character is?

[conuly]

Oh, no, people are frequently unclear on why they need to specify whether a book they read "as a kid" was read when they were 5 or when they were 15.

[kareina]

The second one just reads to me like someone started typing a sentence, got interrupted, then finished the sentence, making certain to include the information they meant to include, without going back to see if it was already there.