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Chocolate Chocolate Moons (Book) Review

 
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At a Glance...
 

Page Count: 220
 
Genre: ,
 
Author:
 
Year Published:
 
Final Score
 
 
 
 
 
2.5/ 5


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We liked?


Lighthearted and quirky.

Not so much?


Over the top use of puns, and confusing pacing.


Final Fiendish Findings?

Chocolate Chocolate Moons is a futuristic mystery novel that focuses more on making jokes and nibbling chocolates than on diving headlong into a mystery. It is quirky, and fun in its own way, but for me the near constant jokes were just a little too over the top.

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Posted April 23, 2013 by

 
Full Fiendish Findings...
 
 

Jackie Kingon brings a sugary sweet mystery that’s out of this world…literally.

Molly Marbles is larger than you average girl, and she’s okay with that..really. But when she wins the opportunity to leave Earth and go to college on the moon, she can practically feel all those pounds melting away, no dieting necessary. She takes her overweight boyfriend, Drew, along and they settle happily into college life on the moon, a place where big is beautiful and really the norm.  Unfortunately, she soon loses her boyfriend to another girl (the unfortunately named Colorful Copies), a fact she resents immensely. Molly soon finds a new boyfriend, gets married, has kids, and raises them to the lovely teenage years. Don’t worry – I’m not giving any of the story away. That’s all in the first ten pages.

The pacing and writing style in Chocolate Chocolate Moons did confuse me a little bit. You can go sixteen years in a single chapter, then a month or so, then go back to something in the past, then skip ahead again. It isn’t particularly hard to follow, but it didn’t exactly flow smoothly either. The book follows the life of Molly, who is obsessed with her favorite candy, Chocolate Moons. When those delicious bites of chocolate heaven are found to be poisoned, Molly is on a mission to find the culprit and exonerate her candy. It features a colorful cast of characters with names ranging from Salami Pastrami to Decibel Point to Jersey Shore, and Molly will have to dig in if she wants to solve the mystery of the poisoned chocolates.

If the names alone made you groan, you are in for something when you read the book. Set in the future, Chocolate Chocolate Moons operates on the assumption that people in the future will have our times rather mixed up, and that places and things will be named after unlikely public figures. These things (and more) are the source of a series of running gags and cringe worthy puns that pepper nearly every page of the book. I’m generally a fan of the quirky, and I’ve been known to throw out some pretty terrible jokes in my day, but I found Chocolate Chocolate Moons to be a bit too much, even for me.

In addition to the rampant punnage, Chocolate Chocolate Moons really fixates on Molly’s weight. In a world (universe?) where nearly everyone is stick thin, and eating is considered passe, Molly stands out for her devotion to good food and her willingness to love herself no matter her size…seemingly. I won’t give too much of the story away, but I was disappointed that the book didn’t stick to one message on the whole weight thing. There is one joke after another made about Molly’s weight, and Molly makes jokes about the skinniness of the other people, and how sad it is that they can’t enjoy food. But the messages end up getting mixed up somewhere near the end, and I found that a little sad.

Chocolate Chocolate Moons is a futuristic mystery novel that focuses more on making jokes and nibbling chocolates than on diving headlong into a mystery. It is quirky, and fun in its own way, but for me the near constant jokes were just a little too over the top.


Amy

 
U.S. Senior Editor & Deputy EIC, @averyzoe on Twitter, mother of 5, gamer, reader, wife to @macanthony, and all-around bad-ass (no, not really)


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