On a dangerous kiss (or three), fruit out of season, a deadly beautiful voice, and the gift of humanity:
I suppose I should feel kinda sorta bad for not posting for almost two weeks, but what started out as an accident of circumstance (busy, busy, busy…) turned into a little experiment. I wanted to see just how much reading I could get done when I focused on reading rather than spending time talking about it. It’s no secret, I bet, that the less I blog the more I read. At least, it’s something I always assumed was the truth based on my memory of past experiences. Now, ten days and three finished books later, I know for a fact it’s true.
The first book I finished after completing Sarah Waters’ gripping The Little Stranger, was Lips Touch: Three Times by Liani Taylor. I picked up this book the week of Valentine’s Day, and I have to say it’s one of the better choices I’ve made in a long time. Lips Touch is a young adult collection three short stories, each about how life-changing, momentous, and downright dangerous a first kiss can be. Not only that, but these stories are fantasies – dark fantasies teeming with nefarious goblins, plotting demons, and soulless witches.
The first story is probably by far my favorite, “Goblin Fruit.” The story’s protagonist is a witty and smart though socially outcast girl named Kizzy. Though the story is set in present-day, Kizzy’s family is an oddity. Kizzy lives in a shack with her extended family just outside of town. Unlike most modern-day families, Kizzy’s family has no television (they tell stories around the fire), they hunt their own food (rather than purchasing it from the supermarket), and bury their dead kin with almonds to eat, coins for bribery, and weapons for protection in the afterlife. They also believe in werewolves, vampires, and, of course, goblins. Naturally, Kizzy thinks her family is an embarrassment. And, despite the warnings of her deceased grandmother, Kizzy finds it hard to believe that anything so dangerously fantastical as goblins could ever find their way to the little podunk town where Kizzy lives. Until, that is, a handsome and charming new boy named Jack Husk arrives at Kizzy’s high school and all-but promises to give Kizzy her first kiss. But, at what price?
I loved this story, not only because I could more than relate to Kizzy’s feelings and status in high school, but because it was beautifully written. Taylor perfectly captures what it’s like when you’re young and you’re yearning and yearning for someone special to give you your very first kiss. She also perfectly captures what it’s like to be young and to lack the perspective to appreciate those differences that will make you beautiful, unique, and attractive when you get older. The story begins thusly:
There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? Yes.
Them.
The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.
Like Kizzy.
And somewhere later in the story, Taylor writes:
Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer layer had begun to melt away while she wasn’t paying attention, and something – some new skeleton – was emerging beneath the softness of her accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true fom might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.
Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailbooat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango , lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy’s blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn’t possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them in a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as cooly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer’s small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that shoud would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.
Kizzy wanted.
I’ll let you read to find out whether Kizzy gets what she wants in the end. You might be surprised.
I enjoyed the second story, “Spicy Little Curses Such as These,” almost as much as the first. It’s a sweet yet dangerous love story about a girl who, as a baby, was cursed by an old woman (at the behest of a demon – don’t ask) with a beautiful voice that would kill everyone within hearing distance if she ever used it. The girl grows up believing the curse and never speaks a word. Her resolve is unshakable until she meets a handsome soldier who falls in love with her, but who is far too practical to believe in curses. How will this love story end, then? Will the girl and the soldier live happily-ever-after or will the girl speak only to loose everything and everyone that truly matters to her? With Taylor, one soon becomes to realize, you never know.
Which brings me to the final tale, “Hatchling,” which I didn’t like as much as the first two but was just as creative and unpredictable. ”Hatchling” is the story of Mab and her daughter, Esme who are on the run from an immortal race of creatures named Druj. Fourteen years ago, Mab stole something very precious to the Druj and they’ve been hunting her ever since to get it back. Just as they are about to be recaptured, Mihai, an outcast Druj, comes to their rescue, and Mab and Esme soon learn that the story isn’t really about them, after all. It’s about Mihai and the woman he fell in love with a long, long time ago. A woman he’s been trying to save for the last fourteen years…
Again, I may have not have liked this story as much as the other two, but it’s all relative, and as a whole Lips Touch: Three Times is definitely a book you don’t want to miss. Finally, I won’t have written properly of this book if I don’t mention the illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo. The cover, I know, isn’t really anything to get excited about (I took the jacket off of my copy), but the illustrations before each story are some kind of wonderful. A taste:
………

The great thing about the the three or four pages of illustrations the preface every story isn’t just that they’re beautifully rendered, but that they tell a story as well. They truly preface the stories in that they illustrate what happened before the narrative action of the story begins.
All in all, despite my reservations about the cover, I thought this book was beautiful from the front pages to the illustrations to the text. If you love fantasies or fairy tales with a dark but imaginative twist, good writing, or simply a well-told story, then you’re going to love Lips Touch: Thee Times. Highly recommended.
I meant to post this on or around Valentine’s Day, but as you can see I was distracted by an enormity of good reading. Lips Touch isn’t the only good thing I’ve read the past ten days, and between today and tomorrow I hope the share the rest of it with you. I can’t promise that I’ll post over the course of the week, because too much good reading is taking up far too much of my time and I’m loving every single, blissful minute of it.
Happy reading, everyone.

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