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.
Character Analysis
Jeanie Ellis
Jean Marie Ellis grew up in a small town in western New York and often made visits to her Aunt Dot’s café in Dream Harbor. By the time Jeanie reaches young adulthood, she tires of small towns and moves to Boston for college where she studies business. She gets an administrative assistant job at a financial firm straight out of college and is soon promoted to the assistant of the CEO. Over the next seven years, the job becomes demanding enough to take over her life, and Jeanie finds herself always putting her professional life before her own needs, making little time for any kind of relationship. The day she discovers her boss at his desk, dead from a stress-induced heart attack, provides the catalyst for Jeanie’s decision to change her life.
Jeanie’s belief that she needs to change her life to avoid ending up like her boss Marvin provides the narrative engine for her growth as a character. Her Aunt Dot’s decision to retire and let Jeanie run The Pumpkin Spice Café provides her with the perfect opportunity to start fresh and begin her arc that sees her move from insecurity and isolation to self-acceptance and connection. As she begins her new life, Jeanie convinces herself that she needs a new personality in addition to different circumstances to change her life—an approach that proves misguided and adds tension to the narrative. She wants to be as different as she can from the woman she was in Boston and attempts to mold herself into someone else—her eccentric and laid-back Aunt Dot. Jeanie often refers to this image of herself as the “New Jeanie,” a version she believes will fit the standard archetype of “the quintessential café owner. Calm and cool, maybe a little quirky” (49). Jeanie’s fear of that she won’t belong in Dream Harbor undergirds her need to reinvent herself with a sense of urgency. She fears that if she doesn’t belong in Dream Harbor, she won’t belong anywhere.
Jeanie’s fears about not belonging, not being good enough, and not knowing who she is follow her throughout her time in Dream Harbor. Though she knows the people of the town need her for their caffeine, Jeanie feels like an unnecessary addition to the already close-knit town, despite their attempts to invite her in and show her friendship. These fears lead Jeanie to wonder whether she should stay in Dream Harbor. Her quickly evolving relationship with Logan also leads Jeanie to question whether she is worthy of love at all, and she frequently wonders if everyone who works for her secretly hates her. Due to this fear, Jeanie continues the habit she had in her previous life of putting everyone else before herself, often stretching herself thin to provide for her community and prove she deserves a place there.
In spite of her overwhelming fears, Jeanie is a dynamic character who changes throughout the book, moving from a place of insecurity and isolation to one of self-acceptance and community that allows her to embrace The Feeling of Belonging. Though her intent is to become a new version of herself, Jeanie discovers she doesn’t need to be someone else in order to love herself. At the end of the novel, she recognizes that “[m]aybe she could be cheerful and dark, messy and competent, sunshine and rain, New Jeanie and Old Jeanie mixed together” (218). She also learns to own her decision about whether she belongs in Dream Harbor, and chooses to stay in the place she is beginning to love with the café she has worked hard to build. By the novel’s conclusion, Jeanie comes to see her inherent worth, which helps her to accept the love and support her community offers her. Though she doesn’t know entirely who she is by the epilogue, Jeanie understands that she doesn’t have to know everything in order to live a happy life.
Logan Anders
Logan Anders grew up in the small town of Dream Harbor on his grandparents’ farm. After his father left and his mother died when he was young, the town as a whole adopted Logan as their own. After his mother’s death, Logan was afraid to venture into town and hid away from everyone except the animals he rescued and took care of on the farm, which he took charge of as an adult. Logan befriended Annie and Hazel when they were children, as they were two of the few people who didn’t just treat him like the boy whose mother died. Laurie Gilmore uses Annie and Hazel to exemplify the importance of friendship and support throughout Logan’s arc.
Gilmore uses Logan’s personal history to inform the tensions and challenges he experiences in his relationship with Jeanie. Nearly a year before the beginning of the novel, Logan met a woman named Lucy when she was on vacation from her home in Boston. The two fell in love despite Logan’s fears that Lucy wanted more than a small-town life on a farm. Knowing she needed a grand romantic gesture, Logan proposed to Lucy at the Christmas tree lighting, the town’s most attended event. Lucy ran away and later explained she was back in Boston, leaving Logan both heartbroken and embarrassed—the culmination of his deepest fears. The town pitied Logan even more than they had when his mother died, causing Logan to hide away from them, only going into town when absolutely necessary, to avoid reminders of his failed proposal. He made a rule for himself that he wouldn’t date anyone who was a flight risk and wouldn’t date openly in front of the town again. Logan continually criticizes the nosiness of the community, when all Logan wants to do is hurt in private.
Jeanie’s arrival prompts Logan to finally face his past and acknowledge his deep-seated hurts and fears, highlighting the novel’s thematic interest in The Ongoing Process of Healing After Trauma. The town quickly notices a change in Logan once Jeanie arrives. Drawn to her, Logan continually finds his way back into town and back in the spotlight as his neighbors begin to suspect an attraction between him and Jeanie. However, Logan can’t stop comparing Jeanie to Lucy. Every time he thinks of pursuing Jeanie, he worries that she will leave because she wants more than he can offer her in Dream Harbor. Logan lets his fear of abandonment continually get in the way of his relationship with Jeanie:
[H]e’d let that fear guide every interaction he’d had with Jeanie. It made him want to deny his attraction to her. It made him want to hide what was going on between them. And it made him freak out and jump to conclusions instead of talking to her (190).
Throughout all of the ups and downs of his relationship with Jeanie, his experiences with Lucy and the loss of both of his parents lead Logan to fear he will lose Jeanie no matter what she tells him about wanting to stay.
Like Jeanie, Logan is a dynamic character who experiences a significant transformation over the course of the novel. As soon as his abandonment issues are brought to his attention, Logan begins to piece together just how much control his fear has over his life. He realizes that his own needs and wants are more important than his fears and that Jeanie deserves his trust. When he announces his feelings for her in front of the whole town, Logan also changes his relationship with the town itself, finally allowing his neighbors who care about him to participate in his life rather than hiding from them. Ultimately, Logan learns to put himself before his fears in order to live the life he wants.
Hazel and Annie
Hazel and Annie are two of Logan’s best friends whom he has known since childhood. When the whole town pitied Logan for the loss of his mother, Annie and Hazel treated him like a normal boy. However, both women are fiercely protective of their friend, even if they are protecting Logan from himself. Hazel and Annie are the first to warn Jeanie against breaking Logan’s heart, but they quickly warm up to Jeanie and welcome her into the town. Since the three women become close in Jeanie’s first days in Dream Harbor, Gilmore positions them perfectly to provide support for both Logan and Jeanie throughout their romantic arc. When Logan breaks up with Jeanie, they are quick to take Jeanie’s side, knowing Logan is acting out of fear. Hazel even smacks Logan to get her point across as the two reveal that Logan has abandonment issues that are preventing him from having a healthy relationship, highlighting the novel’s thematic interest in The Effects of Fear on New Relationships.
Despite their friendship and their similar relationships to the two protagonists, Gilmore also positions Annie and Hazel as foils to one another. Hazel is quiet and bookish, fitting the archetype of the small-town bookstore owner, just as Jeanie hopes to fit into her role as a café owner. Her father is the mayor, and she lives a relatively quiet life in Dream Harbor, helping out her friends when needed. Where Hazel is soft and quiet, Annie is brash, loud, and unafraid to speak her mind. She provides a less gentle touch when needed and is quick to take action. The owner of the bakery has a longstanding feud with the local pub owner, Mac Sullivan, yet Annie’s friends believe there is a romance brewing between the two. A romance between Hazel and Logan’s other best friend Noah is also hinted at throughout the novel, foreshadowing both women acting as the protagonists and romantic leads of later novels in the Dream Harbor series.
Norman
Norman is the longest-serving employee of The Pumpkin Spice Café who helped Jeanie’s Aunt Dot to establish the coffee shop. He has long harbored feelings for Dot, though he has always been afraid to tell her, believing she doesn’t feel the same. When Dot announces her retirement, Norman wants to buy the café from her, but Dot thinks Jeanie needed it more. Wanting to scare Jeanie away from the town and the café, Norman begins to cause Jeanie small inconveniences, hoping she will see how hard it is to run a café. These minor acts of sabotage drive the mystery element of the novel forward. When Jeanie doesn’t give up as quickly as Norman wants, he turns to more serious acts of vandalism, escalating the mystery further. In this way, Norman’s character emphasizes and builds upon Jeanie’s fears of not belonging in town. Eventually, Norman confesses his crimes to Jeanie, admitting they were beneath him. When Dot returns from her vacation, she confronts him, and Jeanie gets her aunt to forgive Norman. However, Dot admits that she wanted Norman to retire and settle down with her, and that is part of the reason she didn’t sell him the café. Dot and Norman confess their feelings for one another and talk about the wasted years, giving Logan and Jeanie an insight into what their life would have been like if they weren’t honest with one another.
