The Pumpkin Spice Café

The Pumpkin Spice Café falls into the genre of contemporary romance. Although The Pumpkin Spice Café explores serious themes such as grief and trauma, Laurie Gilmore imbues the plot with a lighthearted tone punctuated by many comedic moments. Contemporary romances are categorized by their happy endings and familiar plotlines but often focus on the main characters’ personal growth and the obstacles they must overcome to achieve their happy ending. As in The Pumpkin Spice Café, most contemporary romance heroines and heroes are flawed; these narratives often show protagonists helping each other overcome barriers to not only becoming romantically involved but also being better, happier people.

Just as contemporary romance novels rely on familiar narrative structures, they also often feature tropes, archetypes, and common situations, such as enemies-to-lovers relationships, marriage-of-convenience plotlines, and quaint settings. The Pumpkin Spice Café uses many conventions typical of contemporary romance novels, including the forced proximity trope, in which continually being in the same settings and situations forces Jeanie and Logan to confront the feelings that they had been trying to avoid. Secret dating is another common romance convention used in The Pumpkin Spice Café, where pretending not to have feelings for one another forces Jeanie and Logan to confront what else they are hiding. Small-town settings are also not uncommon in contemporary romance novels and can be found in works such as Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, Ashley Poston’s The Dead Romantics, Sara Adams’s When in Rome, and Tessa Bailey’s It Happened One Summer. Gilmore uses the small-town setting of Dream Harbor to show the strengths and struggles of tight-knit communities and highlight Jeanie’s efforts to feel she belongs somewhere.

The Dream Harbor series novels are also workplace romances, so-called due to a novel having a professional setting or the characters having some form of professional relationship in addition to their romantic one. Though workplace romances vary widely in their plots, settings, and time periods, books in this subgenre are defined by the tension between characters’ romantic interests and their professional duties, such as Jeanie’s struggle to balance her feelings toward Logan with her and her café’s standing in the overprotective community. As a whole, the subgenre of workplace romance heightens the stakes of romantic conflict, as characters in these novels have more at stake than their hearts alone.

The Pumpkin Spice Café and Gilmore’s other novels in the series also fall into the subgenre of the “cozy” romance. In “cozy” subgenres, the settings, plot points, and themes are often relatively peaceful or have lower stakes than many other novels in the broader genre. They often involve a picturesque setting like the quaint town of Dream Harbor in autumn, and the problems the protagonists face outside of their relationship—such as the small acts of vandalism in Jeanie’s café—are not life-defining problems. Cozy romances also often involve light elements of mystery and magic, not unlike Jeanie’s determination to discover the ghost that is haunting her café. Though cozy romances are often considered “light reading,” they can still offer meaningful commentary on significant issues and themes.