"Ultimately, the most important reason Farzin is fat is because fat people deserve love. There are millions of people out there who are not a size small and it can’t possibly be fun to read book after book and watch movie after movie in which only skinny people ever find true love, and fat people are either villains, sassy sidekicks, or the butt of jokes."
"Climbing The Date Palm" is the second book in Shira's 'Mangoverse' fantasy fiction series, which centers Judaism, queerness, feminism, and dragons; the first is "The Second Mango". "Mango" is available from Prizm Books (e-book) and Amazon (Kindle and paperback); "Date Palm" is available from Prizm and Amazon as an e-book, and will be available in paperback by the end of the month -- and the paperback can now be pre-ordered from Wild Iris Books (which also still has hard copies of "TSM", including autographed ones). Book three is "A Harvest Of Ripe Figs", which will be published by Prizm on January 21st.
And all three books include other fat / bellied / not-thin / ... characters.
Shira can be found on Facebook, Wordpress, and Tumblr.
Here are two pieces of Kaveh / Farzin art by Becca Schauer (the second is so squeeworthy that I can't even):
