In The Mirror

by Odessa Rose

What does a woman do when she needs to prove that her boyfriend is not in love with his wife? This is the dilemma facing physical therapist Jasmine Falls, who goes against her common sense and good home training and becomes romantically involved with Daniel Roberts, a community organizer with a wife and two young children.

Jasmine is blissfully content with her secret love affair until it begins to cause friction between herself and her best friend, Candy, who sees Jasmine's love for Daniel as selfish, despicable, and just downright dumb. And then there are Jasmine's parents, who are well on their way to admitting that the daughter they reared to be open-minded but not stupid has fooled around and gotten herself mixed up with somebody else's husband.

Desperate to keep Candy from yip-yapping about her being a homewrecker and to keep her parents from lying awake at night wondering where they went wrong, Jasmine does the unthinkable. She breaks into Daniel's house. But unlike some more infamous home invaders, Jasmine's goal is not to knock off Daniel's wife or make goulash out of the family pet. Her only objective is to do what every woman in her position wishes she had the guts and opportunity to do--become a fly on the wall of her lover's life so she can bear witness to the fact that Daniel is in love with her, not the woman he's been married to for the past thirteen years. The question is, does Jasmine see what is meant to be or what never should have been?

In this passionately written story of love, choices, family, and friendship, Rose shows the other woman in a way she hasn't been seen before, even by herself.

354 pages, Paperback

First published June 3, 2014

About the author

Odessa Rose was born and reared in Baltimore, Maryland, which serves as the backdrop for her fiction. She spent her childhood surrounded by books, for her mother is a voracious reader of horror, in particular Stephen King. When she was nine, Rose read a short story in Reader’s Digest. The eloquent way in which the author wove words into story so fascinated Rose that she was compelled to announce to her mother that she wanted to be a writer. Her mother’s reply was, “Well, write, baby.

In 2000 her first novel, Water In A Broken Glass, was published by La Caille Nous Publishing Inc. Water In A Broken Glass was #6 on the “On-Demand Best Sellers” list. Its sales captured the attention of BET Books. It has been recorded for the Maryland School for the Blind. It is on Towson University’s Rainbow Lounge and Resource Library booklist, was used in a graduate level literature course at Wake Forest University, and is mentioned in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. Accredited Online Colleges ranked Water In A Broken Glass #17 on their 20 Essential Novels For African American Women. Several book clubs have selected Water In A Broken Glass for their monthly read, and it continues to attract new readers. In 2018, Lodge Street Films, an independent film company, released the film version of Water In A Broken Glass.

On June 3, 2014, Rose's second novel, In the Mirror, will be published.

Rose received her BA in English from Coppin State University and her MA in literature from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the co-founder of This Is Baltimore, Too, a video project that features the great people and things going on in Baltimore City.