Jasmine Nights

My long time track record as a hopeless romantic prepared me for the partaking of Julia Gregson’s Jasmine Nights, a book geared more towards female readers. All I knew when I jumped into the book was that there was a wibbly wobbly love story in the midst of a WWII globe trotting adventure where the female lead played a singer turned spy for the British government and her beau, an injured fighter pilot on the mend, chases her across the world in a desperate plea to complete the small connection that enamored her to him in the first place. Would they find each other despite their lives and goals traveling in opposite directions? Would war come between them in a tragic turn of events? So many questions to be answered in the books 432 page body, printed no less in microscopic print making each page a small chapter unto itself. So how was it?

Saba, a beautiful singer who traveled to hospitals to cheer up wounded soldiers, the place she first meets Dom her fighter pilot love interest, receives the chance to travel with an entertainment troupe. Saba has a small back story where we learn that her voice was once the family pride until she entered womanhood and men no longer admired her voice but wolf whistled at her physique. After that it is forbidden and she must choose between her desire to be an entertainer and her family. That’s not a bad way to kick off our story. Dom on the other hand is an injured fighter pilot being nursed back to health. I instantly disliked him when we went into his back story, having once been engaged to a woman who couldn’t stand visiting him and breaking it off, we learn that he was a bit of a womanizer and a cheater. As a man maybe I miss the attraction women have with these type of male characters, they usually always end up getting the girl because they’ve learned some moral lesson in love, but as the saying goes “Once a cheater….”. In any case the two have a spark which is quickly diminished by inconvenience and misunderstanding and from there Gregson loses my interest completely.

I burned through almost half the book waiting for the love story to kick in and it never did. I believe it took the story 173 pages before the two main characters are reunited. The rest of the story is a highly descriptive, but drab, detailing the coming and goings of Saba and her troupe of performers as they travel and interact with other characters. There never felt like there was any immediacy, we lose touch with characters for chapters at a time and even when we are reunited with them their brief appearance is so forced for the sake of setting up some kind of urgency that it just doesn’t feel enveloping. In a sense I was bored and the read felt like a chore. By the time the love story actually kicks in there are only glances of real involvement that by then, to be honest, it was ruined for me.

If you tore out about 150 pages of this novel you’d have yourself a pretty decent story. It’s just to much filler, to many unnecessary characters, and a story set in a time and place that barely work themselves in as little more then background noise ( for a majority of the tale). I was pretty disappointed that I forced myself through the entirety of the book without the kind of pay off I was hoping for. As always final judgment is yours. Enjoy.

Book Images

Cover: 

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