Kevin Kern asked Kristin Harmel:

I won an ARC of the Room on Rue Amelie, from Goodreads. I will review it, but I wanted to mention a small mistake, on page 264, I think. You refer to Thomas's plane as a jet. Jets had not come into being, yet. I know this because my father was an aircraft engineer during the war. They were developing them, but they mostly worked hard on making better fighters and bombers, so we could crush Germany & Japan?

Kristin Harmel Hi, Kevin. You're absolutely right! Unfortunately, the ARC (advanced readers copy) is, by nature, an uncorrected version of the book, and as such, there are a handful of errors and typos. Most (hopefully all!) have been caught and corrected by the final version, but because we want to give people the chance to read (and judge) the story itself, ARCs are often printed before all the final fact-checking is done, with the understanding that errors and typos will be caught and changed before the final. It's always interesting (and a bit mortifying for the author) to find the differences between the ARC and the final. In this case, I think the "jet" reference has been corrected in the final version, which will be out in three weeks, but honestly, I'm not positive. Thomas was indeed flying a Spitfire, which you are correct in saying was not a jet. I did a lot of research about RAF aircraft, but I think this is one of those regrettable errors in which a pass-and-go assumption on my part overrode my instinct to fact-check that single word. I spent a lot of time focusing on what would have been involved inside the cockpit and probably used "jet" as a synonym for "aircraft," "plane," or "fighter" in an effort to avoid distracting word repetition, without giving a second thought (in that passage, which is about a plane going down) to the mechanics of the Spit's power source because I was focused on what was going on inside the cockpit--and if this indeed snuck through, it wasn't caught by the aviation expert that I had read over the flight chapters either. My mistake, absolutely, and in doing a quick word search, it appears that's the only instance of using "jet" in the book. Ugh, how frustrating. How interesting about your dad being an aircraft engineer during the war. I hope you enjoyed the ARC aside from that error.

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