The Kissing Game: Short Stories

To escape the pressures of suffocating parents and a possessive girlfriend, seventeen-year-old Piers takes a job as a keeper of a toll bridge and its cottage. There he befriends Adam, a charismatic wayfarer who shows up one day and refuses to leave. He also befriends a girl named Tess, and soon he and Tess find themselves strangely attracted to Adam and falling under his spell. The three test their sexuality and the bonds of their friendship as they discover who they are—and arent—in a harrowing course of events that leaves all three wondering if you can ever really know anyone.

 

Like the other books in The Dance Sequence, The Toll Bridge can be read alone or as part of the series.

In this provocative collection of short stories, Aidan Chambers explores moments of truth, when a character or an event suddenly reveals an often surprising meaning: a girl loses her humanity when she takes a summer job as a theme-park character; a boy tries to save a girl from a fiery death, only to discover the same event happened one hundred years before. And the titular story, in which an innocent game takes a fatal turn, will haunt the reader for a long time.

These thought-provoking stories lend themselves beautifully to discussion, and once again Chambers treats us to his fiercely intelligent, finely crafted prose and incisive understanding of the wonderings of young people on the verge of adulthood.

Aidan Chambers is the author of the highly acclaimed Dance Sequence of young-adult novels: Breatktime, Dance on My Grave, Now I Know, The Toll Bridge, Postcards from No Mans Land, and This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn. Aidan won the Michael L. Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal for Postcards from No Mans Land, and was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award, childrens literatures highest honor, for his body of work. Hes only the second British writer to win it. He lives in the west of England with his American wife, Nancy.