by Karen Rowan

El Callejón del Beso is a well-known legend from Guanajuato, México that took place in an alleyway that was so narrow that two people could stand on the balconies on either side and kiss. Don Luis and Doña Carmen meet and fall in love in Guanajuato, but their love is forbidden in the Mexico of 200 years ago. She is the daughter of a wealthy man and he is a miner in the silver mines. Will they find a way to run away together and marry?

Even today the story of the Callejón del Beso is re-told. People come from all over the world to kiss on the third stair step of the Callejón del Beso in search of seven years of good luck. Kissing on the wrong step, though, brings seven years of bad luck. El Callejon del Beso is a novel for level 3 students of Spanish in the Fluency Fast series of readers. It uses a vocabulary of 430 Spanish words, including 50 cognates and many previously known words, to tell a 2,767-word story with past, present, and future tenses, and conditional mode and present and past subjunctive. The vocabulary is high frequency and includes the 24 highest frequency verbs in Spanish as well as words appropriate to the time period of 200 years ago.