This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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Forget the news cycle and the savagery of social media and book an extended vacation for your mind with Dana Perino’s debut rom-com “Purple State.” It serves all the thrilling crushes, heartwarming moments, and homespun comfort you could ask for, and I’m calling every politico, uptown baddie, horse girl, PSL babe, and farmers market sis out there: This one’s for you.
This romantic romp skirts the “Fifty Shades” stuff and keeps things suitable for work — apart from the intoxicating smell of a new boyfriend’s T-shirt. By the last line, I was tearing up and wishing for a hundred more pages.
Here’s the setup. Three New York City besties known as The Crew (Dorothy “Dot” Clark, Mary Russo, and Harper Lee Adler) say goodbye to the Big Apple for a year to pitch in on a Democratic election in normie Cedar Falls, Wisconsin. While they’re convinced they’ll miss the hustle and bustle of the city, they’re equally maxed out on the usual: accidentally flirting with guys who play for the other team, struggling to afford life, and feeling stuck in their careers.
So, over cocktails, they agree to one last wild adventure together. A temporary respite from their “what am I doing with my life” era. Everything sounds like a good idea after a glass of sangria.
Once they settle into their new digs just outside of Milwaukee, things get real — and covered in manure. Maybe you can take a girl out of the big city, but can you take the big city out of the girl? The Crew grow to appreciate the Midwest charms of indie bookshops, restaurants with quaint names like “Cocoa and Cabernet,” and locals-only wisdom, but as they count down the months until their return to normal life, unexpected connections with three of Cedar Falls’ most eligible bachelors make things a little complicated. The hot, handy guy-on-a-farm aesthetic only cranks up the heat.
“Purple State” is the fifth release from Dana Perino and her first fictional work. According to my coworkers who saw me flipping through pages, eating up every word like an AMC MegaBag of movie popcorn, there’s no shortage of love around here for the Fox News commentator and New York Times bestselling author. After the third time I heard “love Dana Perino,” I looked up to see if Dana was standing behind me.
I’m also a fan, but I’m not making commission on every sale of “Purple State.” I’m just a girl, standing in front of a book, asking you to love it. So here’s my honest take: Don’t overthink it. Sink into this breezy beach read like a pumpkin spice hot tub topped with apple pie cold foam and, if you’re a city gal, indulge in the quaint comfort of rural life.
Hallmark movie energy abounds. I admit to openly rejecting saccharine hot-cocoa-and-mittens meet-cutes — and then wrapping myself like a burrito in my duvet while wishing my boyfriend were stringing Christmas lights around the town square he secretly flooded with water so it could be an ice skating rink. As Mary Russo notes, “Cedar Falls? Are you serious — that’s a real place, not a Hallmark movie town?”
Descriptions of a dairy barn as “pungent” reminded me of childhood sleepovers at my friend’s family farm when we fed young calves from giant milk bottles and rode the moving feed trough, pretending to “interview” them, until I could no longer stomach the stench. (I was a ‘burbs girlie.) Never mind the one time I witnessed the birth of a calf. Let’s just say I never wanted to grow up to be a veterinarian.
But please show me the ice-cold soul who can resist the Cedar Falls harvest festival on a perfectly crisp autumn morning. With everyone holding “steaming mugs of apple cider,” a pie-eating contest, and a live band with a banjo, it’s so dang cozy, you could fall in love with the nearest stop sign.
Still, Dana doesn’t leave the brunch-and-bodega crowd behind. Her depictions of New York City outline a delicate tattoo on the hearts of anyone who ever dreamed of living it up in a hand-me-down loft and zipping all over town with her dream guy, toasting cocktails with girlfriends at Joanne Trattoria in real life.
“On the one hand, she pictured herself in a corner office at the firm, having made partner by the age of thirty,” Dana writes of Dot. Describing her high-rise apartment fantasy, with a wardrobe of gorgeous clothes and no money problems, Dana continues, “She’d throw dinner parties, donate to the Met, and still make it to Sunday supper at her parents’ house.” Like some kind of Carrie Bradshaw utopia, it’s that impossible dream that makes it hard to let go.
For those of us living in our own purple states of varying kinds, Dana also offers a soft landing where no one side feels too extreme, or “right.” With everyone able to maintain civil conversations and keep their priorities in order, the push and pull between political ideals provides the background music to relationships and daily routines. Like most of us do in real life, we leave the crazy stuff for the internet.
I mention how much everyone loves Dana Perino because that’s what inspired me to dive a little deeper on the author. I soon recognized her long, happy marriage to her English husband, Peter McMahon, mirrored in the characters who own the Cedar Falls bookstore (but she’s British; he’s American). Having no kids of their own, the fictional couple dishes out sage advice at just the right moment. Like I imagine Dana and Peter do.
The dog on the jacket cover also looks exactly like Dana’s copper-colored vizsla, Percy. That kind of thing, and the subtle shoutout to Dana’s Fox show “The Five” and Greg Gutfeld, personalizes the story.
Not gonna lie, I found some scenes to be a touch unbelievable, and a few of the jokes land like soft-serve vanilla that falls off the cone and onto the floor. (These are New Yorkers; they need quick-witted dialogue with bite.) And a surprise HGTV-style makeover doesn’t quite pay off with the emotional reveal. I guess not everything can be “Fixer Upper.”
But I don’t care. It’s almost summer reading season. Treat yourself to “Purple State” and yet another reason to love Dana Perino.
