When Jasmine Blooms by Tif Marcelo
334 pages, Paperback
Taken from Goodreads: From USA Today bestselling author Tif Marcelo comes a timeless tale of motherhood inspired by Little Women about one woman’s grief, hope, and second chance with the daughter she lost.
It’s been two years since Celine lost her daughter Libby. Desperate to escape her grief, Celine throws herself into her work, determined to be the strong, capable woman the world believes her to be. But there’s no fooling her family.
A shocking intervention brings an impossible choice: confront her grief or risk losing the family she still has. Reeling, Celine wonders what her life would have been like if she’d chosen her first love instead of her husband and avoided this pain altogether.
Celine wakes the following day and is shocked to realize that what-if has become reality. She’s with her high school sweetheart, her daughters aren’t quite her daughters, and her home is being rented by the daughter she thought she’d lost forever.
As she reconnects with Libby in this parallel world, Celine is forced to face the problems in her real life: her unwillingness to move forward, the tension that’s always rocked her family, and the hard truth that not everything can be fixed by a mother’s love.
My Thoughts:
If I was not a fan of
Tif Marcelo before I read When Jasmine Blooms, I would be a fan now. This book is one of my top books of
2023. The characters were unique, not
always likable. The storyline was one
that pulled me in from the very beginning and never let me go. There were so many times that I was worried
that there would be a hole in the story but Tif Marcelo knew exactly how to
pull it all together and move seamlessly between the real Celine life and the
what-if Celine life.
What a unique story! What-if…. What if you
married someone else? What would you
life look like? Would you have
kids? Live in the same place? This is that story. I could not put this book down. Celine was not always likable. She was a workaholic, she had disconnected
from her family, and she was not taking care of herself. She also had lived a mother’s worse
nightmare.
I was happy that the book did not go back and
forth. We start in real-world Celine and
then go to what-if Celine seamlessly.
The middle of the book was entirely what-of Celine and we stayed there
for a long while. I like that in that world, Celine still knew what her other
option was. She could see what she would
be missing out if she had made different choices. I enjoyed watching her realize what she
would have missed if she had made different choices.
Tif Marcelo is an author I recommend often. All of her books are amazing. Jasmine in Bloom is a must-read.
Thank you Tif Marcelo, author, and Lake Union
Books for a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.
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Meet Tif Marcelo (taken from her website):
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