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.
Themes
The Feeling of Belonging
From the very beginning of the novel, Jeanie fears that she won’t fit in with her new community in Dream Harbor unless she reinvents herself into someone completely new, establishing the trajectory of her character arc toward self-love and acceptance. When she meets Logan, Jeanie “trie[s] to channel Aunt Dot’s free-spirit vibes,” believing she needs to fit a certain archetype of the “friendly neighborhood coffee-shop owner, ready with a smile and your favorite drink” in order to belong in the town (11, 12). Though she’s spent time in Dream Harbor as a child, Jeanie still feels initially unnerved by how different life the small town is compared to her previous life in Boston. Laurie Gilmore portrays Jeanie’s efforts to start her life in Dream Harbor with a clean slate through her attempts to assimilate with her neighbors in various ways—coming to town events, joining the book club, and doing whatever she can to please her community without considering her own needs and desires. She examines the mannerisms, dress, and behaviors of her community like an anthropologist, at one point noting the following:
Chunky scarves that looked like a grandmother had knitted them [seem] to be integral to the look of Dream Harbor as well. And Jeanie [doesn’t] own a single pair of fingerless mittens. They should hand them out when you cross into town (82).
Despite these many attempts to integrate herself more and more fully into the community, her fear of not belonging stays with her, causing Jeanie to question whether she should leave Dream Harbor. Gilmore uses the open question of whether Jeanie will stay in the town to undergird the central tension of the novel’s romantic arc, since it plays on Logan’s deep fear of abandonment. Jeanie often fears that no one in town likes her despite the frequent overtures of friendship offered to her, suggesting that Jeanie’s true journey is internal—learning to love and accept herself. As the acts of vandalism in her café become more persistent and serious, Jeanie immediately connects them to a belief that someone is trying to run her out of town—an externalization of her deepest insecurities. By the time Gilmore reveals Norman as the culprit in the novel’s conclusion, Jeanie’s personal growth enables her to recontextualize the attacks as demonstrative of Norman’s fears and feelings rather than evidence of her own inadequacies.
Gilmore represents Jeanie’s journey toward belonging as an ongoing process in which she continually finds herself confronting her insecurities. In Chapter 27, just as Jeanie is starting to gain some self-confidence, her fight with Logan pinpoints her worst fears when he insinuates she doesn’t belong in Dream Harbor, saying: “[M]aybe this isn’t really where you want to be” (181). Ironically, Logan and Norman’s insistence that she doesn’t belong in town pushes Jeanie to identify exactly what she wants and move toward it. She integrates herself further into the fabric of the community by working hard to make the café what she wants without help from Logan. In doing so, she realizes that she alone can choose whether she wants to leave or stay. One of the most pivotal moments in the novel comes in Chapter 30 when Jeanie finally recognizes “she belong[s] here in Dream Harbor. She like[s] being here and she like[s] herself here” (194). By the end of the novel, Gilmore moves Jeanie from a place of fearing she will never belong anywhere to realizing that belonging is an internal process only she can let herself have.
The Ongoing Process of Healing After Trauma
Gilmore opens her novel by establishing the life-altering events that both Jeanie and Logan face prior to their meet-cute that influence their actions and decisions over the course of their romantic arc. Jeanie struggles with the trauma of discovering her boss dead at his desk from a stress-induced heart attack—an incident that motivates her to change everything about her life to avoid going down the same path. Wanting a fresh start, Jeanine quits the job and moves to Dream Harbor shortly after, telling herself that she’s “starting fresh. [She’s] a new woman. The quaint seaside town of Dream Harbor and its inhabitants [know] nothing about her, and she [plans] to take full advantage of that” (8). Jeanie’s traumatic experience defines the stakes of her fresh start as life or death, creating a sense of urgency in the narrative. Jeanie convinces herself she needs to create a “New Jeanie” — a version worthy of a new life. Throughout the novel, Jeanie refers to the “New Jeanie” as the exact opposite of her former self, suggesting that the process of building a new life in Dream Harbor is also about embracing the idea that she is worthy of a fulfilling life just as she is. Jeanie views her current self as intense, nervous, and overly talkative, and tries to become the perfect image of the “friendly neighborhood coffee-shop owner, ready with a smile and your favorite drink” (11). Over time, her friendships in Dream Harbor and her relationship with Logan allow her the space to acknowledge her true feelings and desires, leading her on a journey toward self-acceptance.
Gilmore positions Logan as a foil for Jeanie in that, after the shock and embarrassment of Lucy’s public rejection, he convinces himself that nothing should change and becomes obsessed with everything staying the same. Logan gives himself strict rules for dating and allows himself no leeway, wanting everyone around him to act like nothing had ever happened. Gilmore’s portrayal of Logan suggests that these rules provide him with a feeling of safety that allows him to avoid confronting his heartbreak directly. Logan’s attraction to Jeanie disrupts his carefully ordered life making the avoidance of his past trauma impossible, catalyzing his healing process. Due to his unaddressed abandonment issues, Logan doesn’t think he can trust Jeanie, yet over time he comes to learn how much his fear holds him back. Similarly, Jeanie learns to recognize that she doesn’t need to give up everything about herself to feel that she’s safe and belongs in Dream Harbor. By the end of the novel, Jeanie understands that “she could be cheerful and dark, messy and competent, sunshine and rain, New Jeanie and Old Jeanie mixed together” (218). Individually and as a couple, Jeanie and Logan take on the tasks of healing and rebuilding so they can love themselves and each other.
The Effects of Fear on New Relationships
Throughout the majority of the novel, Gilmore emphasizes fear as the main factor that drives the actions of her romantic leads. Logan’s fear of abandonment in particular guides all of his choices in his relationship with Jeanie until eventually he recognizes how much it influences him. Over the course of his arc, Logan comes to understand that his fear of forming serious relationships didn’t start with Lucy’s public rejection of him—it’s rooted the abandonment of his father and the death of his mother early in his life. Gilmore frames Logan’s recognition of the impact of his past trauma as an ongoing process, one that doesn’t finish when the novel concludes. As Logan reckons with his childhood trauma, he’s able to see the ways his fear causes him to push Jeanie away. Gilmore lays the groundwork for this epiphany by establishing the ways his fear of abandonment is often triggered around Jeanie, reflecting his belief that she has many reasons to leave Dream Harbor. Logan literally pushes Jeanie away when there is a chance their relationship could be discovered. As Jeanie suggests, “[H]e [can’t] bear the thought of anyone knowing what they’d been up to these past few weeks” (138). When Jeanie invites him over to her apartment, Logan must “ignore the flash of anxiety he [feels] at the sight of the still-packed boxes in Jeanie’s room […] Temporary. Unsettled. This room scream[s] impermanence” (171). He panics when he sees the papers from the real estate agent, automatically assuming that Jeanie is going to leave exactly as Lucy did and lashes out, telling her that she does not belong in Dream Harbor.
Jeanie’s fears about fitting into Dream Harbor manifest in her relationship with Logan in ways that trigger his own fears, creating the central conflict in their romantic arc. Like Logan, she feels initially afraid of the relationship going public, as she doesn’t want to hurt Logan or her newly forming place in the town if things were to end badly. When she believes Logan doesn’t actually want a serious relationship with her, Jeanie immediately pulls away. However, when Logan stops hiding his feelings for Jeanie from the town, Jeanie’s fears shift and she questions whether she’s stable enough to be in a relationship, asking herself, “She’d wanted this, hadn’t she? She’d wanted Logan to choose her for real. But somehow, she’d conveniently forgotten that she had to get her shit together, too” (161). Throughout the novel, Logan and Jeanie both worry that they’re unworthy of each other, laying the foundation for the novel’s resolution in which their conflict is resolved through internal self-acceptance that enables deeper love and trust between them. Jeanie thinks she doesn’t have her life organized enough to be with Logan, thinking of his “kind and sturdy and considerate” nature and wondering, “[W]hat [does] she have to offer in return?” (66). Once Jeanie recognizes her own self-worth independent of Logan, she’s able to truly open up to a future with Logan unfettered by the fears and insecurities that defined their early connection. Concurrently, Logan learns that he cannot let his fears rule his life. As both characters address their fears, they finally start a healthy, new relationship.
