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Reviewed by Romuald Dzemo for Readers' Favorite
White Jasmines by Hasti Saadi can only be described as an intimate dialogue with God. The book follows a woman in midlife, experiencing emptiness and a lack of love. She sets out on a spiritual odyssey to uncover the meaning of love, discover her purpose, and her place in life. What follows is a captivating, soul-nourishing dialogue that will take you through forty days of questioning, conversation with God, acceptance, awareness, and spiritual enlightenment. The book is written as a diary. Beginning with the narrator’s sense of existential crisis and longing for love, it traces her reflections on heartbreak, family, faith, and loneliness. Throughout, she seeks meaning in the simplest of earthly moments, like a child’s visit, the touch of white jasmine, and the changing seasons. She engages in philosophical musings delivered in poetic language.
Hasti Saadi’s work is beautifully crafted for anyone who wants to experience the well-springs of life. The narrative is in the first-person narrative voice. The character’s desire to engage with God and life for 40 days is a journey that unveils truths about life. I watched her confront memories of childhood, the pain of losing her brother, nurturing friendships, and her evolving relationship with a young neighbor girl, Elif. Through each day’s meditation, I found gems to ponder upon and lessons to take from it; there are reflections on acceptance, self-forgiveness, a reconciliation with loss, and longing. In the midst of it all, she establishes an inspiring dialogue with God that felt real to me and that captured the depth of her humanity. By the end of the forty days, the narrator has not found all the answers, but she has found peace in the act of seeking, loving, and remembering, and this is one of the powerful lessons of White Jasmines. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking meaning.
