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Readers > Talk it Up! > Discussion guides > 2012 Oregon Reader's Choice Award Nominees > Lips Touch: Three Times

Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor

Discussion guide by Maria Lowe

Summary

Three tales of supernatural love, each pivoting on a kiss that is no mere kiss, but an action with profound consequences for the kissers' souls:

Goblin Fruit: In Victorian times, goblin men had only to offer young girls sumptuous fruits to tempt them to sell their souls. But what does it take to tempt today's savvy girls?

Spicy Little Curses: A demon and the ambassador to Hell tussle over the soul of a beautiful English girl in India. Matters become complicated when she falls in love and decides to test her curse.

Hatchling: Six days before Esme's fourteenth birthday, her left eye turns from brown to blue. Little does she suspect what the change heralds, but her small safe life begins to unravel at once. What does the beautiful, fanged man want with her, and how is her fate connected to a mysterious race of demons?

Summary from Amazon

Booktalk

There are three of them, three girls who dream and hope and yearn. They ere ripe for tasting, for kissing, for loving, and each of them has a secret they don’t dare tell.

Three girls, three worlds, three secrets.

Kizzy's family is odd. They are from the Old Country, and they believe in all kinds of things other people don’t think even exist, like vampires, goblins, ghosts, the evil eye, and curses. But Kizzy doesn’t tell anyone at school about that. She is a junior in high school, and she talks about Mick Crispin, and how much she wants to be the girl he sits with, and hugs, and kisses. She wants him so much that her soul hangs half outside her body, hungering for it. That is why the goblins want her soul-it would be easy to persuade her to give it up, because it is half gone already.

But Kizzy is only one girl, and I promised three. There is another girl living in India, a girl cursed with a beautiful voice, a girl who never speaks, because anyone hearing her voice will instantly fall down dead.

And there is a third girl, a girl who had brown eyes until just before her fourteenth birthday, when they turned blue, like pale blue, cold winter ice. It is a sign, but she doesn’t know it. Her mother knows what it means, though, she knows that everything she has done to keep her daughter safe has been in vain.

Be careful who you kiss.

Booktalk written by Joni Richards Bodart

265 pages, 9th grade and up

Discussion questions

Warning! Some of the questions contain key elements of the plot. Do not read if you don't want to know what happens!

Questions for all the stories in Lips Touch: Three Times

  1. Which story did you like the best and why?
  2. Did you look at the illustrations before you read the story? If so, did the story told in the illustrations seem different after you read the text?
  3. Did you feel like the illustrations added to or distracted from the stories?

Goblin Fruit

  1. Have you ever read Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin's Market"? If so, how does the story Goblin Fruit differ and how is it similar? Do you like one more than the other?
  2. Can you empathize with Kizzy’s feelings about her family being different than everyone else's?
  3. Do you think you would be tempted to kiss Jack as Kizzy was in the story?
  4. Why do you think it took Kizzy so long to understand the signs from her grandmother and why did she ultimately choose to ignore them?

Spicy Little Curses Such as These

  1. The first sentence says; "Kisses can ruin lives." Do you think this is true in the story? Why or why not? Do you think it’s true in real life? Can you think of some examples to back up your opinion?
  2. Agreeing to exchange of the lives of 22 children for Anamique's cursed voice haunts Estella for years. Do you think one girl's suffering (and the potential for her to unknowingly kill many) was a fair trade for saving the children? Explain your answer.
  3. Do you feel that there are similarities between Estella's and Anamique's lives? If so, what are they?

Hatchling

  1. When Esme first encounters Mihai, do you think he is someone Esme can trust? Why or why not?
  2. How would you feel about experiencing other people’s memories like Esme?
  3. If you could watch the world through stolen eyeballs like the Druj queen, what would you want to see?
  4. If you were able to shift shapes like the Druj what would you most want to be?
  5. Would you want the ability to live forever like the Druj? Why do you think Mihai wanted to be human again once he understood he had once been?
  6. Were you surprised that the queen came to Mihai as an eagle at the end of the story? What do you think happened after Mihai whispered her back to her human cithra?

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Activities

Read Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market" before or after discussing "Goblin Fruit."