It’s no secret that I have been a huge admirer of Devney Perry’s novels from the moment I got my first taste of her special brand of storytelling, her small-town settings playing backdrop to some of the most emotional romances I’ve had the pleasure of reading of late. But with Tinsel, Perry delivers a story that is rare and understatedly breathtaking—a story of two people from very different worlds, both struggling to break free from their families’ expectations of them, while paving their own paths in life. Written with warmth and sensitivity, perfectly paced and splendidly characterised, this is the kind of story that stays with you long after you’ve run out of pages to read, and it’s the kind of book that swallows you whole, going straight for the heart.
Was I the person she’d portrayed? Was that how everyone saw me?
Sofia Kendrick was born to opulence. But while her two elder siblings were groomed to take over the family empire, Sophia grew to become ‘the other Kendrick child’—the pretty, pampered princess best known for her frivolous shopping sprees and her many media scandals. So when Sophia suddenly gets a very public and harsh reality check, she flees to Montana for a holiday weekend with her big brother. But the relaxing escape she was hoping to find soon becomes a valuable life lesson in perseverance and hard work, and in finding true beauty in the most unexpected of places.
Where else did I have to go? I was useless. I was a mockery. As miserable as I was, helping at this bar was better than going back to New York and listening to people snicker behind my back.
Dakota Magee is the kind of honest, hard-working man Sophia has never attracted in life before—her previous lovers usually being more interested in her money and her last name than the lost young woman hiding underneath the picture-perfect façade—but it doesn’t take long for the raven-haired bartender to see Sophia for who she truly is in her heart. And the more he gets to know her, the more she intrigues him.
She was an enigma. A puzzle. She was a woman who had everything in the world at her fingertips and yet seemed so . . . miserable and lonely.
Their physical attraction is undeniable from the start, and harmless flirting between them soon escalates into a steamy affair where they not only can’t keep their hands off each other, but they begin to develop real feelings for one another, too. A real future together, however, remains painfully out of reach—their romance a victim of bad timing, geography, and even other people’s prejudice—yet neither of them ever stops wishing things were different.
For once in my life, I’d found a man who was worth my attention. Except when I looked into the future, I couldn’t picture us together.
Even as Perry continues to tackle the very angsty romantic aspect of the storyline, she never loses sight of what this story is truly all about—two people wanting to live a life of their own choosing and wanting to be more than what others told them they were. In Sophia, we find a young woman who, regardless of the endless opportunities available to her, is desperate to find true purpose in her life. In Dakota, on the other hand, we find a young man torn between his family’s expectations of him and wanting to follow his heart. And while their romance is central to the story, the real takeaway is the unfaltering will of the characters wanting to be in full control of their own destiny.
“I’m not going to fall.”
“You might.”
“Then you’d catch me.”
Brimming with emotion, depth, and all the feels, Devney Perry hits all the right notes with a feelgood story about love, identity, and family, and proves once more that she’s a writer we all need to be reading right now.
“I see it. I see it so clearly, and it’s magnificent. It takes my breath away.”
“See what, babe?”
“The future.”
“I wish you could see it too.”
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Lark Cove - Recommended Reading Order
(standalone stories with interconnected characters)
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