Cheers to Hypertext Magazine for celebrating The Geography of First Kisses in their One Question Series and sharing an excerpt from the book’s beginning passages!
Here’s the question!
“Of all the stories in The Geography of First Kisses, the title story throws the reader headlong into location, geography, and the compass points that lead to love, or perhaps the idea of love. In choosing an unnamed teenage girl to narrate this story, what was the objective?”
Follow here to find the answer!
The excerpt is tied to this question as well as the answer. Here are the beginning passages of the title story from first section, Compass Points.
The first was Leon. A small, muscular boy. A midshipman at the academy. He knew about compasses, easterly winds, how to bring the boat about on white-capped seas. I went for his blond hair and his deep voice, both like honeycomb, thick and golden and crowded, the waxen chambers, the echo in my chest.
Summer grew brighter, and I refused to go back home to New Orleans, nearly sixteen, without that first kiss. Sweet sixteen and never been. We never said it aloud. Those of us who stayed in the corners at dances, at our own tables. All girls, all the time, not too shy, but not quite pretty enough.
For the entire excerpt, READ ON.
