A review by beefmaster
Starving Zoe by C. Derick Miller

2.0

while I was reading this, I was trying to put my finger on why some anachronisms annoy me and others don't. Starving Zoe is full of anachronisms and bits and bobs that stick out awkwardly, such as the protagonist thinking he would give a Prize to the person named Nobel who invented Dynamite or when the protagonist muses about "political incorrectness." Most of these induced eye-rolling in yours truly and one had me wince aloud. The dialogue didn't bother me so much, anachronism-wise, but I did kind of scoff when the self-proclaimed uneducated protagonist mentioned "karma." There's no way this guy who grew up extremely poor on the streets of Boston in the mid 1800s knows what karma is! But I still can't quite pinpoint why this annoys me when in other historical fiction, I welcome anachronisms. Perhaps it's due to how elbow-nudging everything is? The anachronisms aren't there for structural or thematic purposes (eg. the bus and costuming in Jesus Christ Superstar) but rather as in-jokes for the reader to "get." No thank you, I don't want to read Ready Player One again. Anyway, this is my third of the nine Splatter Westerns and so far the worst.