Purple State

Dot, Mary, and Harper arrive in Cedar Falls with different expectations about what their year away from New York will accomplish. Compare the trajectories of the three women. How does Perino use their similarities and differences to exploring competing definitions of adulthood, success, and belonging?

Mary’s involvement in the Taylor family dispute brings an accomplished New York corporate lawyer into a conflict involving a rural Wisconsin family. Analyze the power dynamics created by this storyline. Does Mary’s intervention strengthen the novel’s portrayal of local agency, complicate it, or do both simultaneously?

Analyze Perino’s use of character foils in Dot’s development. How do characters such as Kitty, Fletcher, Ryan, and Danny illuminate different possibilities for Dot’s professional and personal future without simply functioning as choices she must accept or reject?

Purple State combines several genres, including romantic comedy, political fiction, and the coming-of-age or self-discovery narrative. Choose one of these genres and analyze how Perino uses the expectations of that genre as well as how the novel complicates or departs from them.

Analyze the characterization of Danny, Jake, and Tommy independently of their roles as romantic partners. To what extent are they developed through individual histories, conflicts, desires, and limitations, and how does their characterization affect the novel’s depiction of Cedar Falls?

The novel begins with three women temporarily leaving New York and ends with each making a different decision about where and how she wants to live. Analyze the role of situational irony in these outcomes. How do the characters’ final circumstances complicate the expectations established at the beginning of their year in Wisconsin?

Perino, a Republican author, chooses to center the novel primarily on three Democratic women who become closely involved with Republican residents of Cedar Falls. Analyze the effects of this narrative choice. How does point of view shape what readers initially know, assume, and eventually learn about characters across the political divide?

Compare Purple State and Nicholas Sparks’s The Choice (2007), if you have read it. How does each novel explore the conflict between an established life and an unexpected romantic future? Discuss how this impacts Dot and Travis and the change that they undergo in their respective novels.