Maysen Jar

About the Maysen Jar series

The Maysen Jar series is a small, tightly focused duology (plus a later novella) about the Maysen sisters and the messy, funny business of putting a life back together in a Montana bar their family runs. The Birthday List follows a woman who discovers her husband's affair on her birthday and, instead of falling apart quietly, starts checking items off a list of things she never let herself want, with her best friend's brother complicating the plan in ways she didn't see coming. Letters to Molly turns to her sister, working through grief and a second-chance romance built around a stack of unsent letters.

Both books share Perry's signature blend: real emotional wreckage (infidelity, loss, guilt) handled with warmth rather than melodrama, banter-heavy dialogue, and a found-family bar setting that lets secondary characters recur without overcrowding either book. The Dandelion Diary arrived years later as a novella-length bonus entry revisiting the Maysen family rather than a planned continuation of the original arc.

It's one of Perry's shorter, more contained series, closer to a linked pair of books than a sprawling universe, which makes it a low-commitment way to sample her voice before diving into a longer series like Jamison Valley or Lark Cove.

How to read this series

Publication order: The Birthday List, then Letters to Molly, then The Dandelion Diary. The first two books follow the two Maysen sisters back to back and were released a year apart (2018, 2019); reading them in order lets the second sister's story build on what's already been established about the family and the bar they run. The Dandelion Diary followed four years later, in 2023, as a standalone-feeling coda rather than part of the original two-book plan, so there's no urgency to read it immediately after the first two.