Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor, with illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo

Remember your first kiss? While I’m sure it was exhilarating, it was most likely a great deal tamer than the supernatural busses that take center stage in Laini Taylor’s delicious collection of fantasy romances. In “Goblin Fruit,” a lonely girl wishes for love, but finds something else entirely behind a new boy’s perfect lips: “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.” Beautiful boy or secret beast? Only a kiss will tell…In “Spicy Little Curses Such as These,” a young WWI solider travels to India to forget the horrors of war and finds his true love. Except, she is under a curse that claims if she speaks, all who hear her will die. Will their first kiss unleash passion or destruction? Finally, a young girl finds her fate tied to that of benevolent demon when she discovers she has unknowingly incubated the love of his immortal life deep within her soul in “Hatchling.” Each story hinges on one fated kiss that holds the power of life and death, love and loss, happiness and despair. All it takes is lips touching three times to produce one dreamy, steamy reading experience. Laini Taylor’s luxuriant writing will transport you to faraway lands where demons frolic, Hell is a place of cleansing and rebirth, and destinies are determined by the whim of cold sorceress queens. Her husband Jim Di Bartolo’s opulent illustrations rendered in black, red and cream are the perfect compliment to Taylor’s plush prose, and are so lovingly detailed you will want to go back and linger over them again and again. Still thinking about your first kiss? Relive the magic, danger and decadence of it all again through the richly realized characters in Taylor’s tantalizing tome.