Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Lily Andrews is talking with Som Phin, author of Threads of Jasmine: When Jasmine Blooms at Midnight.

FQ: Thida's connection to Cambodia comes through dreams. Why dreams?

PHIN: Dreams felt like the perfect space because they sit between memory and imagination. You can wake up knowing something felt completely real even though you can't prove it happened. For Thida, that gave me a way to let Cambodia enter her life gradually, until she has to question whether she's dreaming about another life or actually living one.

FQ: The Author's Note mentions Buddhist ideas of reincarnation and past-life traces. What drew you to that framework?

PHIN: I grew up Cambodian and Buddhist, so reincarnation was never a completely foreign idea to me. I was fascinated by the possibility that we might carry traces of other lives without consciously remembering them—through familiarity, emotion, skills, dreams, or that strange feeling that you've known someone before. The book takes that idea and asks what would happen if those traces became impossible to ignore.

FQ: What made you want to ground the romance in a period of real political tension rather than just keeping it purely personal?

PHIN: I love history, and when I write historical fiction I never want history to function as wallpaper. The world should shape what the characters are allowed to want, what they're afraid of, and what choices are available to them. The political tension also matters because readers know history keeps moving even while these characters are falling in love, which gives the romance another layer of urgency.

FQ: Both main characters have to make choices about what they're willing to leave behind. Was there a moment in the writing where you found yourself wrestling with that question personally?

PHIN: Definitely. I think that's a very diaspora question: what do you carry forward, what gets left behind, and how much can you reclaim without losing the life you've built now? I don't experience anything as dramatic as Thida does, obviously, but I understand that feeling of belonging to more than one world and sometimes wondering what part of yourself belongs where.

FQ: How important was humor to you—which is evident in the manuscript—in balancing the heavier material?

PHIN: Very important. I didn't want Thida to walk around contemplating reincarnation and generational grief for three hundred pages. She's still a young woman with a best friend, an opinionated grandmother, awkward romantic situations, and a sense of humor. The funny moments make the heavier ones feel more human to me, because that's usually how life works—we can be carrying something painful and still laugh five minutes later.

FQ: Thida thinks in spreadsheets, protocols, and evidence fields. How did you get inside that kind of mind? Did you borrow from your experience?

PHIN: Yes, probably more than I realized. 😂 My undergraduate background was in biology, and I also studied business later, so I'm very comfortable with organizing information, looking for patterns, and trying to make something measurable. I liked giving that mindset to Thida because it's almost the worst possible personality to give someone experiencing something completely unquantifiable. Her instinct is basically, “Okay, reincarnation is happening. Where's my spreadsheet?”

FQ: Are there any real family or personal stories/experiences that made their way into the book?

PHIN: Not in the sense that Thida or her family are direct versions of mine. But emotionally, absolutely. I come from a Cambodian refugee family, and I've spent a lot of my life thinking about what survives when families move across countries and generations—language, food, beliefs, stories, things our grandparents knew that we realize too late we should have asked about. A lot of that emotional truth made its way into the book even though the characters and story are fictional.

FQ: What do you hope readers universally take from this book?

PHIN: That love and memory can outlive the forms we expect them to take. The book is very Cambodian in its history and cultural details, but I think the emotional question is universal: what do we inherit from the people who came before us, and what do we choose to carry forward? I hope readers finish thinking about their own families and the questions they still have time to ask.

FQ: What can readers expect from you next?

PHIN: More Cambodian stories, definitely. I write across historical fiction, fantasy, romance, and diaspora fiction, but the common thread is usually Cambodian history and culture, identity, family, and the things people carry across generations. I have several books and series in that space, so readers who connect with Threads of Jasmine will have plenty more worlds to step into.

For more information about Threads of Jasmine, please visit the author's website at: somphin.com

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