Wild Jasmine

LB. ENGLEZA ” SPELLBINDING. ” –Romantic Times From the palaces of pashas in seventeenth-century India to the scandalous court of James Stuart of England, one woman struggles against fate to find true love… . Princess Yasaman had been blessed with rapturous beauty, fierce intelligence, and an innocent sensuality that captivates two formidable men–her scheming half brother, Salim, and her loving husband, Prince Jamal. But her days of bliss and nights of steamy passion are shattered when Jamal is murdered and Yasaman flees to England and the court of James I. Calling herself Jasmine, she is reunited with her beautiful mother, Velvet, and her grandmother, the legendary Skye O’Malley de Marisco. Before long, Jasmine is caught up in the tangled intrigues of the court of the Stuart king, James I, where she is admired by the most powerful men in England: Rowan Lindley, Marquess of Westleigh, her good-natured second husband; the Earl of Glenkirk, who tempts her with forbidden passion; and hot-blooded Henry Stuart, prince of England. It is here that she truly becomes Wild Jasmine, a woman who lives and loves with fierce abandon and who surrenders to the deepest pleasures of love… . Set in the early 17th century, the sixth volume about ” the magnificent” Skye O’Malley and her family follows her granddaughter Yasaman Kama Begum, daughter of Indian Grand Mughal Akbar and Velvet O’Malley. Yasaman’s husband is murdered by Salim, her half-brother, who wishes to resume his former incestuous relationship with her. Yasaman’s friends have her spirited off to England, where Jasmine, as she is now called, joins Skye’s household and the beautiful, sexually uninhibited widow dazzles the men. When Jasmine remarries, her husband has King James deed her an Irish estate; the tale detours through rural Ireland and Small’s superficial assessment of Anglo-Irish problems (” Why can the Irish not learn to get along with the English? One nation conquering another is nothing new” ) before tragedy strikes again. Small’s ( A Moment in Time ) pointless repetitions and details that simply pad the story could have been pruned by editing, but more than editing is required to repair a tale in which the characters’ costumes are almost as well developed as their personalities.