I read an article at the weekend about how many international readers interpreted everyday British things featured in the Harry Potter universe as part of the wizardly worldbuilding.
Train trolleys, schools houses and prefects, treacle tarts, Christmas crackers – all things that even Muggles get to experience over here in the UK.
Understandably, when something is unfamiliar to us, it’s very easy to file it under ‘it’s a magical world‘ and get on with the adventure.
House Andrews books have always been especially good at weaving real cultural details, traditions, references and bits of history into their fictional worlds. Their worldbuilding twists and plays with real-life elements, and I am sure most of us have found the boundary blurred at some point or another.
This may not be the clearest example, but it’s one that is always fresh, because people ask about it at least a couple of times a week: why isn’t Andrea Kate’s maid of honour? It’s because Kate is having a Russian wedding, and Andrea is a married woman who would not stand as a ‘maid’ in the same way she would in other parts of the world. It’s not a relationship rift, just a different wedding tradition!
I also remember making an Innkeeper quiz one time and bringing up one of my favourite little jokes from Sweep of the Blade, to great BDH puzzlement:
“Salutations,” Maud said. “Where is the hunting party?”
The Stablemaster didn’t look up. “Gone.”
“Gone where?”
He stopped and gave her a flat look. “Hunting.”
“In which direction?”
“North.”
“I need a mount.”
The Chatty Cathy of the vampire world favored her with another look. “I don’t have any.”
Andrews, Ilona. Sweep of the Blade, The Innkeeper Chronicles 4. NYLA Publishing, 2019. Kindle edition, Chapter 17
Are you ready? I’m not sure you are:
Chatty Cathy was a talking doll first sold in 1959, and her name eventually became shorthand in the US for someone who talks and talks.
And incidentally, if I’m sleeping peacefully in my house and I hear “Tell me a story” in the quiet of the night, that’s Chatty Cathy’s house now. I’m outta there.
Now, the Horde is curious!
Please tell us what detail from an Ilona Andrews book made you stop and look it up?
Did you ever assume something was fantasy worldbuilding, until you discovered it was a totally real cultural reference?
First?
First First of the week 🏆
I found my old Chatty Cathy doll when cleaning out my dad’s house a couple of years ago. Obv, he wa a hoarder, but clearly I hadn’t helped…
I had my own Chatty Cathy, and yes, it was a creepy as it looks in the commercials!
This isn’t fantasy but general fiction. I grew up in Australia. I read books and assumed everything was fantasy. It was a revelation to discover that some of those books were set in real places in the UK. I had not recognised place names and assumed they were fictional too.
I’ve been called “Chatty Cathy” by my family for years, and now my young kids say it! Same with “weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!”
I loved my weebles!
I resemble that Webble without a cane to walk, off our property! That’s what I tell people, and some even know what I’m saying.
A talking doll makes me think of that scary “Talky Tina” doll from the Twilight Zone episode. (Which I know was inspired by Chatty Cathy.)
“My name is Talky Tina, and I DON’T LIKE YOU.”
Without a doubt the scariest episode. I still hate dolls because of it.
I had a Chatty Cathy as a child. Loved her! And southerners have their own version of treacle tart: brown sugar pie.
Those are very different desserts 😀
The treacle tart filling is just breadcrumbs and golden syrup, and it’s much much thinner https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/treacletart_67656. Looks about a quarter of the US pie in cross-section.
Brown sugar pie has a thick layer of filling, rich and custardy, with things like butter and eggs and cream in it.
The thing I had to look up was mammoth donkey. I know horses and horse breeds and k ow the difference between a mile and a donkey but had never heard of one! Very cool and learned something new!
Yes, me too
Me too!
+1
The first reference i searched was mrs o’leary’s cow (i’m from Argentina).
I read about that on Wikipedia after reading the chapter, I remember! (Germany)
Never gave a thought to either of those examples. I now will give away my age and say my friends and I wanted the doll and none of us had one. Very pricey for the time.
Things I look up are mostly foreign names for things that you can generally figure from context, but I just want a bit more info. Kolovershi for example. Roman’s charmed me into buying the insulated cup 😁
I didn’t realize that the Kentucky Castle was a real place until I passed it on a mundane trip to EKU. I knew that there was a castle in Versailles, KY, but didn’t put the pieces together until we drove past.
lol. I had no idea it was a real place until I read this. 😅
Now I need to look it up!
Wow, I missed that one!
We drove past drive from/to Virginia/Oklahoma!
For reference, I’m from
Southern Ontario, Canada (near Toronto). I thought Kudzu vine was a made up thing. Then I saw it mentioned in another post apocalyptic novel by another author also set in the Southern US. Now I Google things I’m not sure about.
Kudzu is scarier than even Chatty Cathy!
I eat kudzu for breakfast!!! Well, kinda. Koreans (and Japanese and Chinese people) do use kudzu in certain dishes, including tea.
Mammoth donkey was the reference I looked up. On dolls, does anyone remember the Thumbelina doll that moved when you wound it up? One of my classmates had one in the 1960’s. I didn’t have Chatty Cathy but I heard they broke easily,
Thanks a lot, now I’ll have that damn Thumbelina jingle playing in my head all day!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3OOx3-r6DM
And my little sister had Skiddle Kiddles.
“Skiddle Kiddles
Little Kiddles that can walk and can run…”
(You started it. Brainwork’s)
BrainWORMS
everything from slavic to middle eastern mythos were always a fun to dive into… spent endless time with my friend google lol…..
that was always the fun with IA books. you get to learn about loads of trivial stuff
happy Monday Mod R & IA
I had a Chatty Cathy and so did my sister. We thought it was hilarious to make them talk to each other. Then our little brother pulled their strings too hard and turned them into just other doll, and we abandoned them because yes, they were really ugly. My Shirley Temple doll was much more attractive. Good times 😊
I know I’ve looked up things in IA books; it’s one of the great things about reading e-books on a PC; just pop over into the browser and say “what was THAT?!” and maybe get an answer. Off hand, I can’t recall examples from IA, but I know I’ve run into some really strange things in other books by authors who were historians or had other specialized knowledge, and just tweaked things… just enough to adapt from “real world” to “unreal world”. Or not. Making it really hard to know for certain. (The example that really comes to my mind is Barry Hughart, and his tales of Number Ten Ox and Master Li.)
Good grief. I haven’t thought about the Barry Hughart books in years. I must now go forth and reread them! Thank you for the reminder
It’s usually the monsters….reading about them in a different author fantasy novel and going…..oh! I guess that’s a real [mythological] thing! The spider witch woman thingy was one of those….maybe a Dali novella…..
I mean, I remember Chatty Cathy. General newer references are ones I need to check out I did Google the origins of bringing receipts even though I was familiar with it. I was just curious.
If you’re American, Chatty Cathy is obv not one of the foreign culture references for you 🙂
As a Cathy, I had Chatty Cathy and Baby Chatty Cathy. Obviously, my family appreciated my verbal skills. While, I don’t have a IA unique quote, I find most of what I look up is historical fact. I have learned so much from all the books! Happy Monday!
I’ve read more about different pantheons because of the references in the books as they made me curious. Thank you HA for expanding my knowledge!
I’m from the teddy ruxbin generation and didn’t have one but my mom was freaked by them they reminded her of a chatty cathy doll. She was like NOPE not in my house!! I had to look up the animals in romans book and i remember there was a post that explained them at some point too.
I doubt Judwinga’s species was the first thing I looked up, but I remember doing it. And looking up Chinese ferret-badger. So I don’t look up places so much as critters and folklore. I was one of those who didn’t follow the recommendation to NOT look up the story behind one of the creatures in Sanctuary, the melalo, I think.
Yep, Jadwiga’s species is one of the few things I’ve looked up. I occasionally do a deeper dive into folklore as it gets mentioned, but usually recognize it as RL folklore. As it were. Although some of it is manufactured RL folklore. Being American, I didn’t have to look up jackalopes.
I thought Finch was kicking children across the bog that Fred and George Weasley left in a corridor at Hogwarts because he was “punting” them across
That’s where a reasonable familiarity with Dorothy L. Sayers comes in handy.
oh.. that makes more sense. But kicking them seemed much more entertaining than boating them about. (Although I seem to recall wondering at the time how they got back.)
I love that scene with Maud.
It fascinated me that American schools didn’t have the house system, and my grandchildren, all of whom loved Harry Potter books, had no idea why it was important to contribute to your house points.
A couple decades ago there was a small movement to pilot the house system into American high schools, as a way to keep kids from falling through the cracks in a school of well over a thousand, maybe two thousand, students in four grades. Sorting into four houses meant closer relationships between faculty and students. The schools that did it were happy with their results, but I don’t know how far the movement expanded, if at all.
Not all schools have the house system over here, but it isn’t uncommon, I believe. Mine did, but it was an independent (paid for) school–so I can tell you that boarding schools have a LOT more pastoral care than a housemaster/mistress that occasionally comes to the common room, and a single medical staff member.
Wait, what? American here. The house system wasn’t an HP thing? That’s real??
I always wondered whether House Andrews were coin collecting at some point. Honestly, it’s very rare that people know that the first coins were made of electrum!
Some things are just personal reference, I think. Growing up, I completely missed the “wedding planning” bug. Then (and now) it seemed insane to me to spend lavish amounts of time and money on them. I never paid attention to wedding traditions – in any culture – and why someone would rigorously follow what tradition demanded escapes me. I do read the invitation, buy the appropriate gift, wear what I think are the appropriate clothes, but that is as far as I go.
I couldn’t really see Kate being bound by a tradition that she didn’t really grow up in, either, but it was a minor thing.
Same. As declaring a Maid/Matron of Honor was not on Roman’s list of wedding things Kate”had” to do, I just figured she let everything else slide as she wasn’t interested. We married at the courthouse, so I completely empathized with the desire for simplicity. Never occurred to me that it was a cultural reference. If something is in a foreign language or a specific creature/deity that I am unfamiliar with in any thing I read via ebook, I have gotten spoiled by the right click, look it up online feature. I don’t do it as often for the rare print books because of the added activation energy required to put down the paper book and pick up a mobile device. 🤷♀️
I looked up treacle when I read Alice in Wonderland for the first time. At the Mad Hatter’s tea party, the dormouse tells a story about a “treacle well.”
I had already read the first few Harry Potter books by that point, so I was then able to understand what treacle tart was.
It’s a common misconception that treacle wells up from the earth like water–in the UK we know it comes from the treacle mines!
I don’t think I look up what I’ve never heard of before. When I read the Kate Daniels books, I assume the references are a mix of lore and IA imagination. It’s actually the stuff I know a little about that I research afterwards. Like the Wendigo in book 7. I was already familiar with it from the Witcher games, but IA wrote it a little differently and I wanted to know what the “original” lore actually said.
I think it’s impressive IA uses the lore that’s out there as a base and then weaves their own ideas into it to make it work better for their stories. They are so creative!
Sometimes in Hidden Legacy world I don’t know what’s magic and what’s Texas. Bluebonnets were one thing I looked up, but there’s more subtle things it’s harder to check.
Like for instance Augustine‘s secretary having green hair – is this because it’s magical world and people look more colourful, or is she particularly avant-garde and Augustine is trying to convey a particular message about his business being cutting edge, or are high end secretaries just cooler in Texas for real.
On the other hand, the Edge felt exactly like the poor rural area I grew up in, despite being on the other side of the world and not monster-infested
Curran’s beast form.
I looked up a lot of the animals mentioned in Magic Claims, including Curran’s ancestral form.
This is a great topic! So many things I looked up! Not only because I thought they were only in the book’s world, but often because I thought they were real and I wanted to know the history of it.
I’m always so impressed with when they take a ‘real world’ god and twist it to fit their world. THAT is what I fangirl over in the KD books. I love to see what Google says about the gods, then how HA has created them to be.
I’ve read up on everything from ancient times in Irak/Iran for the Kate Daniels series.
Read up on place names in the US that are described as being warped from magic.
Read about the whole Russian/Slavic pantheon.
and so much more (Greetings from Germany)
Shiva, Rakshasas, lions various knives, fighting styles, Morrigan, black dogs, marids, ifrit, wendigo,
I loved the Chatty Cathy reference. When I was young, my sister had a blonde Chatty Cathy doll and watching the commercial brought me back to playing in our attic listening to the doll saying “Tell me a story”! Good times! HaHa ; )
all the playfull noun/adjective + ‘R’ Us (allusions to Toys ‘R’ Us 🙂
I had to look up to see if North America ever had lions.
Not necessarily a thing but a phrase that I am 99% sure what the reference is but would love to have it confirmed. At the end of Chapter 10 of TKWNKM, Solentine pays Maggie a visit and she says to him “I could you tell you, but I have to charge.” Is that a nod to Kelis’ song “Milkshake” or something else?
I love that pirogies are available any time even from street vendors. We used to make huge batches and it was a family project. we even had homemade pirogies at my wedding reception. All the food was cooked by My Mom and Aunts. some frozen in advance to have enough. There was ham, turkey, stuffed cabbage and pirogies with all the sides. My guests from work were amazed
Looking up the Viki streaming app mentioned in Catalina’s trilogy had unexpected time sucking consequences.
I’m old enough to have owned Chatty Cathy
In Magic Tides when the ferry driver pins his foot to the deck of the boat with the crossbow and Kate calls him Simo Hayha bc Andrea had a rifle named after him. Totally thought Simo was made up, but noooooooope.
Love the combo of Umaru-chan, judgemental crystal cat, and disassociating china owl as a Monday visual vibe.
They’re Ilona’s desk friends 🙂
This isn’t HA, but I’ve giggled that “Turkish Delight” seems to have become an American eponym for reading about an unfamiliar cultural reference in a book. We all have to read _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ in school, and we all wind up wondering, “What did the Turks make that is so delightful that Edmund betrays his family for the promise of more?”
Fresh lokum can be delicious – and all the more to kinds in sugar-ration England, I imagine. But we all know that decision is all Edmund 😀
I am reminded of a young woman I met who had just moved to Oregon from western Texas and was freaked out by the trees. She had seen forests in movies, but just assumed they were CGI…
it’s mainly the food items that I have to look up. there was a recipe for a sandwich in Innkeeper that had some sort of whip thing in. if I remember it was some sort of canned cheese? you can’t even get that over here!
It was Miracle Whip 🙂 . I went on a whole rabbit hole about it too. It’s more like mayonnaise or salad cream than canned cheese, from what I can gather.
Not to be confused (I constantly confuse them) with Cool Whip, which is like a ready-whipped sweet topping for desserts, adjacent to whipped cream, and it comes in tubs.
Might as well be arcane substances to European readers hehe.