What do you do when your expertise is in American politics and our culture but your hobby — better yet, your calling — is mentoring and you want to take all three of your skills and use them in a purposeful way?
Well, if you’re Dana Perino, you push yourself to pen your first novel, which is exactly what the Fox News host, communications professional, former White House spokesperson, and native of the American West has accomplished with her outstanding debut, Purple State.
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Her debut novel (Perino’s nonfiction books have been New York Times bestsellers) unfolds choices that many contemporary women face. However, Perino’s superpower is introducing characters who feel familiar, similar to how you feel when you find a beloved jacket you thought you’d lost, and the joy of slipping it right on like a silk glove, as though you wore it yesterday.
Dorothy “Dot” Clark is stuck, or at least she feels that way. She is in a career, a city, and a profession that she’s not sure is giving her the purpose she doesn’t even understand that she intuitively craves.
Unwilling to be a bystander in her own life, Dot decides to leave for the Midwest to work on a political campaign in a swing state coveted by both parties. She joins friends Mary and Harper for an adventure navigating the differences in pace, attitudes, and rootedness that differ from the circles she experienced in her prior New York life.
Mary and Harper have their own reasons for leaving New York. And Perino illustrates their life choices and new lives in a world of pickup trucks and the absence of influencers, in a poignant but very funny way.
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What brings this novel to life for me is how authentic it is to the people I meet when I’m doing my job as a reporter in the middle of the country, where, more often than not, most people have to navigate encounters with people who hold different views from them but still find that doing so comes naturally. They don’t rush to social media to whine about it; they work with it.
The gift that Purple State gives the readers is just that: the plot, the people, the surroundings. All come naturally when placed in Perino’s competent hands. You find yourself easily immersed in a world that doesn’t seem foreign, even imagining who the people are at the center of the story. Oftentimes, you will find yourself picturing either yourself, a family member, or a best friend in Dot, Mary, and Harper, along with the scenery around you.
