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to watch a video review of this book on my channel, From Beginning to Bookend.



Nectar and spice, goblins and demons, memories and sorcery abound in three tales of supernatural love that hinge on a kiss that’s unlike any other kiss.

Readers who’ve only just begun to explore and fall head-over-heels for Laini Taylor’s recently released books will be equally enchanted by Lips Touch Three Times. Taylor employs an imaginative approach to writing that’s uniquely her own and, despite being one of her earliest published works (first released in 2009), Lips Touch Three Times is no exception.

Drawing inspiration from mythology, fantasy, and various religions, Taylor crafts a spellbinding array of characters and locales. She enriches her creations by embroidering everything from the tangible, such as characters or clothing, to the intangible, like dreams or desire, with words evocative of mysticism, whimsy, and romanticism.

His eyes, very dark, canted elvishly upward at the outer corners and were surrounded by delicate bruises of sleeplessness, bluish and tender, giving him the look � [she] fancied � of a poet who had been up all night with a candle and a quill, memorializing a beautiful lady who had fallen from the aristocracy to die penniless of a fever, perhaps in a snowbank, leaving, of course, an ethereal corpse.

While Taylor’s stylistic writing flair remains wonderfully consistent throughout, each of the protagonists in her stories infuse the narrative with their own individuality and longing.

In "Goblin Fruit," Kizzy is a seemingly average teenage girl, relegated to hovering in the shadowy corners of her high school where she watches the attractive popular students from afar. She’s unaware that her �spell-casting eyes� and �wild hair, and hips that could be wild too, if they learned how� make her a natural beauty. Where her dislikes are parochial � her unruly hair, her ankles, being seen in public with family members � Kizzy’s desires are far more sophisticated:

She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly 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 she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.

Kizzy’s family is just as unorthodox and strange. They prefer singing songs in a foreign, unknown language over watching television, and Kizzy’s grandmother tells stories of goblins luring young maidens with luscious fruit then slowly sipping at their souls until the maidens wither their way to an early death. What her grandmother doesn’t tell her is that goblins have the power to shape-shift, so when a new boy of unparalleled attractiveness arrives at Kizzy’s school and takes a special interest in her, she’s not inclined to question whether he could be the death of her . . .

"Spicy Little Curses Such As These" introduces Anamique (Ana), a young beauty with eyes that are �lonely, and haunted, and hungry� because she has reason to believe she was cursed by a demon to never speak. Fearful that uttering so much as one word will kill everyone within earshot, she goes a lifetime refraining from using her voice.

She kept her own voice like a bird in a cage. She imagined it as a willful songbird with a puffed breast, its feathers gray like her eyes, with a flash of peacock blue at the neck, and the cage an ornate prison of rusted scrollwork with a little latched door that she never dared open. Sometimes the urge to do so was nearly overpowering.

When a handsome young soldier enters her life, Ana yearns to speak aloud her love for him and begins to question the validity of the curse. If she’s wrong about the curse, then her voice can at last be set free; but if she’s right, then an utterance of love will kill the man who is her heart’s greatest desire . . .

Finally, "Hatchling" puts forth a red-haired girl with porcelain skin named Esmé whose entire world is upended by one small, unexpected change:

Six days before Esmé’s fourteenth birthday, her left eye turned from brown to blue. It happened in the night. She went to sleep with brown eyes, and when she woke at dawn to the howling of wolves, her left eye was blue.

The reason for Esmé’s transient London-life with her mother is unveiled in this multi-layered story that not only crosses the known world with mythical realms, it explores the idea of (view spoiler)[ shared memories (hide spoiler)]. Readers will pass through one diaphanous veil after another while traveling alongside Esmé as she wades through her memories and navigates the unbridled intensity found in a kiss . . .

With first kisses being central to all three stories, Lips Touch Three Times has plentiful imagery that speaks of virginity, fertility, and sexual appetite. By bestowing the narrative with mention of plump fruits, hungry mouths, and tongues getting a first taste, Taylor successfully portrays passion and sexual desire without resorting to more gratuitous measures.

Further enhancing the book’s succulence are the vividly rendered illustrations created by Taylor’s husband, artist Jim Di Bartolo. His hyper-stylized representation of caged birds, flame-licked demons, and defiant maidens � set against a backdrop of gray and blushing with pinks and reds � accurately capture the sorrowful nature of Taylor’s stories.



What is arguably the book’s only weakness is more than made up for by Di Bartolo’s artistry: Goblin Fruit feels incomplete, but an arresting illustration at the end of the story provides a sense of closure.

Filled with mystery and magic, and glowing with the gloomy, fanciful elegance that’s the hallmark of Laini Taylor’s linguistic genius, Lips Touch Three Times is a dazzling collection of short stories.