Someone recommended Chocolate Chocolate Moons: A Science Fiction Comic Mystery by Jackie Kingon to me, but who, that is also now a mystery. The suggestion was for my personal goal of finding as many positive representations of fat people in books that I can. The advertising for Kingon’s novel asks, “Do you miss Douglas Adams?” This was how I convinced Nick to let me read Chocolate Chocolate Moons out loud to him.

Though a humorous novel, oodles of characters twist up the plot, so I’m going to be unusual for this blog and give you the synopsis from the author’s site: the novel “portrays plucky plus sized chocolate lover catching bad guys, finding a delicious antidote to the poisoned candy. It is a novel set in the future that tells the story of plus-sized Molly Marbles, who wins a scholarship to Armstrong University on the Moon, a haven for the plus-sized set where her weight drops from 287 Earth pounds to 47.6 without so much as passing up a piece of pie. When boyfriend Drew Barron dumps her, then jumps at a job at Congress Drugs, a company that makes low calorie food supplements, Molly’s weight is the least of her woes. And when her favorite treats, Chocolate Moons are found poisoned, she finds she has bitten off more than she can chew.”

You may notice a few things about that synopsis: 1) the typos, 2) the focus on weight, and 3) that we have a simple whodunnit. Only one thing is true, and that is the typos. If a story is good enough, I try not to let errors upset me because not all authors can afford professional editing nor convince a large publisher to take on a novel that isn’t trendy at the moment.

Kingon’s focus is not body size, though I will warn that when Molly moves to Mars with her husband, where the gravity is less and everyone born there grows tall and thin, people make comments about her weight. In fact, it’s the only thing most people notice about her. I’m not sure why Kingon chose to add this fat element other than it rings rather true. If you take a woman who weighs almost 300 lbs out of her house, everyone is focused on her fat body. Therefore, the weight comments stung, but did not outright offend me. Instead, it was like Molly was transplanted to a sad place where people eat fake food, and ever her sister-in-law, a food critic, doesn’t swallow the food she eats. Yet, every time Molly has food, other people are drawn to her like zombies to brains.

Lastly, the mystery is not so simple! Kingon develops a dozen characters, all unique and doing something suspicious related to art forgery, the drug trade, moving up in corporations, creating new diet products in a cutthroat field, poisoning a chocolate supply, etc. The end of the novel rattles off where each character ended up, serving time in prison or moving off planet, changing their identities, etc.

The real joy of Chocolate Chocolate Moons is not in the plotting or even the characters. Instead, it is Kingon’s bizarre humor, so dry, but also intelligent. As I read to Nick, he laughed aloud at references, some I got and others I didn’t. Even the “stupid” humor is funny, which is more of what made me laugh:

“No pulse. He’s dead!”
“Dead? How can he be dead? He was just alive,” Breezy says.
“It works that way sometimes,” Decibel sighs.

My favorite aspect of the novel was how the future setting — hundreds of years from now, in fact — means history is forgotten or misinterpreted. For example, one character goes to an art auction to buy a piece that has, to his chagrin, already been purchased. The art dealer tries to convince the buyer to purchase something else: “We just received a very rare painting of the last hamburger by McDonald.” From what I gather, no one lives on Earth anymore, and so its history is largely tales and books. I had a blast reading Chocolate Chocolate Moons, though I would be lying if I said I could keep the subplots straight.