If you loved the sumptuous language and kiss-as-curse tension in the three tales of Lips Touch—from Kizzy’s brush with goblin temptation to Anamique’s deadly-sweet silence—The Night Circus will sweep you up. Celia and Marco’s secret duel blooms into a doomed romance amid a circus of living enchantments, described in prose as decadent and shimmering as the goblin fruit that almost undoes Kizzy.

Like the demon’s fatal bargain that seals Anamique’s voice and the Druj’s sinister allure in “Hatchling,” Deathless dives into a marriage with the monstrous: Marya Morevna weds Koschei the Deathless and steps into a world of seductive peril. You’ll find the same intoxicating blend of folklore and danger that pulses through the well’s curse and the goblins’ kiss in Lips Touch.

If the lethal allure of the goblin fruit and the fatal beauty of a spoken word in “Spicy Little Curses” hooked you, Uprooted channels that same sense of beautiful danger. Agnieszka is taken by the Dragon to confront the corrupted Wood—magic that tempts, twists, and threatens, much like the irresistible forces that nearly claim Kizzy and shadow Esme’s inheritance in “Hatchling.”

If the aching, fated connections in Lips Touch spoke to you—Kizzy’s yearning, Anamique’s love imperiled by a curse, and Esme’s discovery of a self that isn’t wholly human—then the dream-bridged love between Lazlo and Sarai will feel like coming home. Their romance unfolds in moonlit meetings and impossible truths, echoing the tender, dangerous intimacy that threads through all three novellas.

Drawn to the trio-of-tales structure and the way Lips Touch turns kisses into thresholds of doom and wonder? Carter’s collection delivers razor-edged fairy tales with voluptuous language and danger-laced desire. The Bluebeard retelling, for instance, thrums with the same perilous intimacy that makes “Goblin Fruit” and “Spicy Little Curses” so intoxicating.