Shield of Sparrows
Shield of Sparrows
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Devney Perry on Shield of Sparrows
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Material saved for years, waiting for the right homePerry came to this book carrying years of accumulated material: names, characters, and story elements she had deliberately held back from her fifty-plus small-town romance novels because none of those books were quite the right vessel. When the romantasy finally came together, it became the place she could spend all of it.
There’s a lot of me in this book. A lot of special characters and names and elements that I have been saving for years for just the right story. It’s the longest book I’ve ever written and absolutely my favourite.
Her existing readership knew her for emotional, domestic small-town stories set in Montana, and she knew a genre shift risked losing them before they reached the first page. The framing below was her public answer to that anxiety, written before the book launched.
Shield of Sparrows is 1000 per cent a romance, first and foremost. So, no need to be an experienced fantasy reader. It’s longer than my small-town contemporary books and there’s a bit more action, but it’s still a Devney Perry book with a big romance and lots of feels.
Writing itself arrived late for Perry, not during a formal apprenticeship but in a stretch of domestic life after she left a demanding tech career. The sequence matters: reader first, writer second, and only when she needed a challenge the books she was consuming could no longer supply.
Honestly? I was bored. That, and going a little crazy at home with my kids. I’d just quit a very demanding job and had my youngest son. I was reading a book a day — or more — and it just wasn’t cutting my need for a mental challenge. So, I opened up a Word doc and started writing away.
Eight years and fifty novels later, she arrived at Shield of Sparrows with a reader’s instincts fully intact. Those instincts shaped every structural decision she made.
How she wrote it
One point of view, one outsider, and the revision that fixed the endingBefore she wrote a single scene, Perry produced a synopsis for a foreign publisher. That exercise forced her to nail down what drove her male lead. The harder problem came next: Odessa, the book’s only point-of-view character, has no access to his interior. Perry had to build a reading experience in which everything he is gets revealed through what a distrustful outsider can observe.
I always try to put myself, especially in a book where it’s all one POV, into a position where it’s like, here’s like, I’m her. Nobody trusts me. I’m in a strange area. No one’s gonna tell me anything. And just try to be very realistic about, what would that journey look like? [paraphrased from audio]
Her assistant read the first completed draft and found the ending traumatic. That reaction triggered a round of revision involving her editor and then a second editor, though the changes were surgical rather than structural.
It was not significantly different, but it was enough to where I feel like the twists that were in the original version already just hit a little bit harder. And I feel like it was a better story for Odessa and how it kind of all climaxed at the end. [paraphrased from audio]
After finishing the draft, Perry set the manuscript aside while her publisher worked through other commitments and returned to a sports romance, a full genre reversal. When she came back to edit Shield of Sparrows months later, the distance had changed what she could see in her own pages.
It was really fun to come back to it, to edit it after being away for a little bit. [paraphrased from audio]
That gap let her pull earlier plot threads forward and place them at moments where they would land harder, a kind of structural repair that only works when you have genuinely forgotten what you already planted.
Perry reads Shield of Sparrows more times than any other book she has written, a fact that makes her position on revision less an abstract principle and more a demonstrated commitment. The quote below is how she describes that commitment.
Revisions are probably the most important part of the writing process. That’s like the one area that I never try to shortcut. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A late discovery she was always meant to makePerry spent her twenties in tech, not in an MFA program or a literary apprenticeship. The timeline she describes below reframes the fifty-novel back catalogue: not a slow build toward Shield of Sparrows, but a writer who found her vocation almost by accident and then moved fast.
I didn’t discover my love for writing until I was in my thirties, but it all stems from how much I love to read. Writing feels like that thing I was always meant to do, I was just waiting for the right time.
Nine years into a career built entirely on small-town romance, Perry chose to describe Shield of Sparrows not as a departure but as a completion. The distinction matters for how readers understand what the book cost her to make.
I’ve had the incredible opportunity to write stories over the past nine years, and while I love them all, this book holds a special place in my heart.
What she wants us to sit with
Stay for the story, not just the romancePerry is precise about the series’ gear shift after book one. She had watched a specific trend, associated in her telling with Sarah J. Maas, in which the first romantic lead turns out to be a false start. She built her series to avoid that, but she also built it so that the romance becomes a door into something larger, not the destination itself.
I think the romance is what hooked you in the beginning, but I’m here to tell you a story and you’re gonna stay for the story. [paraphrased from audio]
One of the shaping convictions behind the book involves how parent figures are usually written in fiction, as either convenient obstacles or absences. Perry, writing as a mother, found that convention unconvincing. The choice to give the parent characters in Shield of Sparrows their own histories and their own damage was deliberate.
Parents are people too, just trying to get through their own lives, and we all tackle things differently. [paraphrased from audio]
In a book built around a young woman trying to understand who she is and where she comes from, that insistence on fallible, historically shaped parents is not incidental. It is the engine of Odessa’s entire situation.