45 pages • 1 hour read
Laurie GilmoreThe Pumpkin Spice Café
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 17-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary
Jeanie didn’t want to tell Logan that someone had also been tipping over her flowerpots every night, not wanting to make another big deal out of nothing as she had done with the cat. Yet later that night, she awakes to the sound of breaking glass and sees a figure with a baseball bat fleeing into the alleyway. Certain the figure is a serial killer, she considers calling 911 and then Logan, but she fears she’s overreacting and that this is not what the “New Jeanie” would do. Instead, she texts Ben about her ordeal, who recommends that she call the police, but Jeanie still insists it was probably nothing and she doesn’t want to waste town resources. She ends up telling him about her kiss with Logan instead, and though she tries to fall asleep afterward, she is still awake when Logan sends a text to check in on her at five in the morning. When Jeanie texts back, she lies and says everything is okay.
Chapter 18 Summary
Under duress, Logan attends his second town meeting in a row to talk about the Fall Festival. Jeanie, Annie, and Hazel arrive, and Hazel brings up the break-in at the café, startling Logan. He feels hurt that Jeanie didn’t tell him when it happened. He tries to talk to her about it as the meeting begins, but Pete catches him and assumes he and Jeanie want to sign up to judge the Fall Festival’s costume contest. Jeanie agrees, though Logan knows it will be miserable. Logan offers to drive her home, and on the way, he asks if she misses Boston, but she only replies that she likes it in Dream Harbor. When he asks about the broken window, Jeanie says she doesn’t want to overcomplicate their relationship by calling him whenever she needs something—she doesn’t want him to feel responsible for her. Logan once again reaffirms that he is there if she needs him, and Jeanie agrees to call him the next time she needs help.
Chapter 19 Summary
Jeanie comes to the farm to talk about a new development in what she calls “the Case” of whoever is terrorizing the café. She meets Logan’s grandmother and all his many animals before he gets home and takes her to his small apartment off the main farmhouse.
Chapter 20 Summary
Jeanie tells Logan about more strange occurrences at the café like the refrigerator being unplugged and the cappuccino machine repeatedly breaking. These incidents lead her to believe that one of her employees is sabotaging the café, as no one else would have regular access to the equipment. They rule out Norman, knowing he loves the place and helped Dot to build it. They agree the other two employees would have no reason to sabotage Jeanie. Logan assures her they will figure out who is doing it, and the two kiss until they are interrupted by a knock on the door. Logan jumps away from Jeanie to answer the door for a work colleague, and Jeanie feels that the secretive nature of their relationship is becoming less fun. She fears she will end up breaking Logan’s heart like his friends feared. When Jeanie mentions leaving, Logan sees that she is not happy about keeping their relationship a secret. Jeanie feels more comfortable when Logan offers her the space to figure out what she wants and kisses her goodbye.
Chapter 21 Summary
Noah visits Logan at the farm to see how he is, noting that Logan hasn’t been in town for days. As they talk, it comes out that Noah likes Hazel, but Logan isn’t sure they would be a good fit. Logan surprises himself by wanting to open up to Noah and tells him he thinks he’s messed things up with Jeanie. Logan finds himself unable to stop comparing Jeanie to Lucy, though Noah assures him he doesn’t see Jeanie leaving any time soon. Logan ultimately decides that, though he doesn’t know what he is doing with Jeanie, she is worth taking the risk of going public with their relationship.
Chapter 22 Summary
The realtor Jeanie had been working with when she was thinking of selling the café comes by to drop off some papers and convince Jeanie to sell. Though Jeanie’s still unsure of her place in Dream Harbor, she feels more and more at home there and knows she doesn’t want to sell. Ben calls, and Jeanie tells him about how someone cut the wires on her dishwasher and she had finally gone to the police about the vandalism. When she tells him about Logan, Ben’s advice is to not let him get away with hiding her, because it will be easier for Logan to leave her if no one else knows about the relationship. Jeanie doesn’t feel like Logan would do that to her, but she still worries that he isn’t over his last heartbreak.
Chapter 23 Summary
Logan hasn’t heard from Jeanie in a week when the Fall Festival arrives. He goes to the café and finds Jeanie crying on the floor. She explains that everything is going wrong for her and she has no one to work her booth at the festival, so Logan volunteers and promises they will find out who is messing with the café as soon as possible. They discuss what happened the previous week, and both agree they could have handled the situation better, promising one another that they will make things work and take it slow.
Chapter 24 Summary
Logan and Jeanie work the festival together, and Logan doesn’t hide that they are together, even holding Jeanie’s hand in front of one of the members of the book club. Though she wanted Logan to make peace with his feelings toward her, Jeanie panics at first, knowing that the eyes of the town are on her and she still doesn’t feel like she’s reinvented herself sufficiently to earn her place in Dream Harbor. By the time Jeanie visits Annie’s booth, both Hazel and Annie already know about her relationship with Logan. Jeanie admits her complicated feelings, especially her worry that she will mess something up and break Logan’s heart, but Hazel and Annie reassure her that she should still try.
Chapter 25 Summary
Jeanie and Logan judge the costume contest, which proves to be more intense and physically violent than Jeanie could have imagined. They spend the rest of the day at the festival openly together and Jeanie’s fears start to ease. After they are caught kissing in the haunted house by one of the members of the book club, Jeanie invites Logan back to her apartment.
Chapter 26 Summary
When they get to Jeanie’s apartment, Logan tries not to panic at the moving boxes and lack of decorations, but as they have sex Logan realizes that he is in love with Jeanie and debates telling her. Jeanie realizes that she has no reason to worry about their relationship and that she should try to get out of her own way.
Chapters 17-26 Analysis
As her character arc progresses, Jeanie begins to question whether the “New Jeanie” is really necessary to gain acceptance in her new community. She recognizes the ways her attempts to drastically change herself are getting in the way of her relationships and even her safety. As the new, easygoing version of herself, Jeanie often doubts her instincts, such as when she hears her window break and automatically assumes someone is out to get her. Her early experiences in Dream Harbor have made her feel she cannot trust her gut as her old self would’ve done. However, even when Jeanie’s instincts are proven right, she still doesn’t feel she can acknowledge it, thinking “[l]aid-back Jeanie would look for the perfectly reasonable explanation here” (114). When she spots a man in her alleyway, she doesn’t call Logan or the police, still doubting her own instincts and indicating the growth still necessary to complete her arc. She tells Ben “I didn’t want to seem hysterical […] I don’t want to waste town resources […] It was probably nothing” (115). Jeanie wants to appear relaxed, yet even more so she does not want to be a burden as she believes that would ostracize her from the town and from Logan.
Gilmore suggests that inhabiting the life Jeanie truly wants in Dream Harbor requires her to fully embrace the reality that she is worthy of love and acceptance—a journey that starts with loving and accepting herself. Similarly, Logan feels hurt that Jeanie doesn’t tell him about the break-in, especially after he specifically told her she could count on him to help her, viewing it as a lack of trust in him. Both Jeanie and Logan project their individual insecurities and fears onto each other, putting their relationship in jeopardy and underscoring the novel’s thematic interest in The Effects of Fear on New Relationships. By Chapter 23, Jeanie still doubts herself and her abilities to run the café. She tells Logan she thinks her employees hate her, and she feels pressure to be the put-together, laid-back person she believes the town wants.
As Jeanie’s feelings toward herself slowly begin to change, she starts to feel uneasy about keeping her relationship with Logan secret as she begins to equate openness and vulnerability with The Feeling of Belonging. In Chapter 20, when Logan jumps away from kissing her—“like he [can’t] bear the thought of anyone knowing what they’d been up to these past few weeks,” Jeanie begins to think “this secret relationship [is] less fun” (138). As Jeanie’s feelings for Logan deepen, she finally begins to take to heart everything Logan’s friends have said about him falling in love quickly in relationships and fears the truth of what Ben tells her in Chapter 22—that it’s easier for Logan to abandon her if their relationship remains a secret. She feels it’s harder to trust someone who wants to hide her, raising the dramatic tension of the narrative.
Logan’s decision to stop hiding his interest in her at the Fall Festival and make their relationship public provides a turning point in their romantic arc—shifting Jeanie’s fears about the relationship from Logan to herself. Suddenly, Jeanie thinks of Hazel and Annie’s warnings about going easy on Logan in a new light and fears she doesn’t have her own life figured out enough to be with him. Gilmore uses descriptive language in Chapter 24 to show Jeanie’s rapid progression of emotions, as she says: “The fact that [Logan is] here beside her [is] enough. More than enough. It [is] doing all sorts of warm, swoopy things to her stomach, making the whole morning feel like it [is] cast in a glow of happiness” (159). Yet shortly after, Jeanie thinks to herself “She’[s] wanted this, ha[s]n’t she? She’[s] wanted Logan to choose her for real. But somehow, she’[s] conveniently forgotten that she [has] to get her shit together, too” (161). This progression highlights a common trope of the romance genre in which the romantic leads must first learn to love themselves in order to embrace the love of a partner. In Chapters 25 and 26, Jeanie finally begins to gain some self-confidence and recognizes that she herself is standing in the way of her having a happy relationship with Logan, pointing to The Ongoing Process of Healing After Trauma. Meanwhile, Logan begins to let his newly discovered love for Jeanie distract him from his overarching fears about the relationship.
