Two Weeks to Remember-Discussion Thread

• Our heroine's name is Charity--a lovely Bible name with a correspondingly lovely virtue attached. Chastity, for instance, is lovely as a virtue but icky as a name. It, like Bella or Venus, prompts the hearer to look for behavioral or physical contradictions. (As I confess to doing when Venus Williams went through her rather unfortunate late teens.) Brenda the Bad is easily dismissed because this name sounds like it was made up in the mid 50s (of course it wasn't) and does not have the heft of a Beryl or Euphemia or Charity. But then, my name is Betty Keira and that's a pretty made-up name too...I'll be moving to the villainess queue.[Betty Debbie]I'm not sure whether I'm glad or not to have a "Betty Approved" nickname.

• Norway and fjords always make me think of Slartibartfast of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I also don't buy that she could actually have skied right into one. Off a cliff...yes. Into a fjord...Death By Fjord! Toxic Mold! News at 11. Okay, maybe.
  
  
• Charity didn't go to university because her dad spent his money on old books. Alright. I'll buy that. The Venerable Neels was surely running out of reasons to have brilliant minds mired in shorthand typist pools and this is as good a reason as any.

• At one point, Charity buys fish on her lunch hour, then stores it on the window ledge. You know, for someone presumably trained in food-borne illnesses and dietary safety, The Great Betty is off-hand about the possibility of causing Charity's aunt and father (old people with weakened immune systems) to pop off due to bad fish. I think we have to consider the possibility that had Jake (I'm not going to waste my life typing Professor Wyllie-Lyon any more than I have to either) not shown up, she might have gone on to become a serial murderer. It's not like Charity didn't know that keeping the fish on the window ledge might result in some bad gastro-intestinal news...I did like that Jake took her home that evening in his Bentley - and she was worried about the fishy odor she would be leaving behind. Believe me, a fish left on the window ledge for hours would be bound to hum a bit.
• There are no Dutch things in this book. No Dutch doctors, no Dutch speakers, no Dutch Uncles, no Dutch hospitals/consultations/patients/lectures, no dead Dutch grandmother...Marinate in that awhile.
  
• I love the bit when he sees that he's kept her late and sends her home and then is caught trying to do the typing himself (pecking at the keys with two fingers). She forgets herself and tells him, "You don't keep a dog and bark yourself!" The revolution of the personal computer means that we're all shorthand typists now and that Jake would now know how to drive and text simultaneously (even though our doctors would never be caught dead doing something so fiddly on the road). I used to be like that (taking over jobs that I could do faster by myself). Especiallytaking over things like laundry and dishes (my impatience at the glacial speed in which Dr. van der Stevejinck loads the dishwasher...argh). Thankfully I got over that.
  
• Cover art. Wow, is that hair bad. I take no issue with his carelessly draped scarf and greying temples. I further take no issue with her chunky sweater and heavy jacket or with his beautifully crinkled eyes. But that braid makes her look like a raven-haired Pippi Longstocking--who is Swedish and not English or Norwegian. I take issue with that. No errant breeze was ever so cruel to a woman and I heartily resent the inference that one was.