'Kissing The Virgin's Mouth' is the fictional memoir of Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vasquez - wife, scoundrel, courtesan and mother.
In a world where gender and class roles are rigid and religion predominant, Magda refuses to be a victim. She creates a philosophy of life that she can thrive in, a religion of cynical optimism, pragmatism, and determined gratitude. Seemingly invincible yet always fallible, Magda climbs from a wide-eyed childhood to worldly courtesan life, from youth to the early onset of blindness in middle age.
In the Golden Zone of Teatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico, where tourists and wealthy Mexicans thrive and where poor Mexicans come only to work or visit the shrine of the miracle baby Jesus, Guadalupe performs her daily ritual. In the chair of her beloved Tia Chucha mortared to the roof of her Golden Zone home, Magda shaves her long legs, tells her life stories and thrusts her fierce prayers of gratitude toward the Sea of Cortes. She recounts her life strategies - seasoned with an earthy, hard-earned wisdom - so that she might pass them along to her half-American daughter, Martina, and to her young Mexican cousin, Isabel.
This is a novel about love, the power of sex and the struggles of women. It is about the secrets of survival. It is about what a woman can do. Winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction.
