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.
Symbols & Motifs
Dream Harbor
Laurie Gilmore positions her setting, the small New England town of Dream Harbor, as representative of The Feeling of Belonging. Having grown up visiting her aunt’s coffee shop, Jeanie views Dream Harbor as an idyllic community, an almost magical space. When she leaves her job in Boston wondering what to do with her life, Jeanie returns to Dream Harbor a place to which she has always felt connected. Jeanie’s desire for a fresh start and longing for a place to truly belong raise the stakes of her early days in the town and escalate her fears that she won’t fit into the community. Over the course of her arc, Jeanie struggles to integrate herself into the community because she initially believes that to do so, she needs to reinvent herself into someone new. Jeanie eventually learns that she can find belonging in Dream Harbor just as she is. For Logan, Dream Harbor represents his past failures and public rejection. Logan takes to only visiting the town to make his deliveries before the sun is up so he doesn’t have to speak to anyone. Through their romance, Logan and Jeanie eventually learn that loving and accepting themselves for who they are allows them to connect deeper with each other and their community.
The Pumpkin Spice Café
Much like Dream Harbor, The Pumpkin Spice Café functions as a symbol that represents Jeanie’s hopes for the future and The Ongoing Process of Healing After Trauma. The café provides the inspiration for the “New Jeanie” she thinks she needs to become to earn the kind of life she hopes to live. In imagining the “New Jeanie,” Jeanie ties the image of who she thinks she should be to her view of the “friendly neighborhood coffee-shop owner, ready with a smile and your favorite drink” (11). She puts as much work into her image as she does that of the café, knowing how central it is to the town and believing it will grant her good standing in her community. When Jeanie feels like she doesn’t belong in Dream Harbor, she channels that fear into the café, letting it root her to the town when other things, such as her connection to Logan, feel more precarious. Toward the end of the novel, the pride Jeanie takes in what she’s done with the café mirrors the progress she’s made in loving and accepting herself just as she is. When she thinks about the idea of selling the café, Jeanie is reminded of how far she has come, especially after devoting years of her life to another job that she ultimately found empty and unsatisfying. Comparing her job at the café to her job in Boston, Jeanie thinks, “At least now all her hard work [is] for her. For her dream. For her life. She [isn’t] ready to give up on that yet” (149). As the novel draws to a close, The Pumpkin Spice Café comes to represent Jeanie’s evolution. The work that she’s poured into the café reflects the ongoing process of healing as she puts down roots in her new life.
The Ghost/the Vandal
The strange sounds and mysterious incidents in the café when Jeanie first arrives in Dream Harbor serve as a motif highlighting the novel’s thematic interest in The Effects of Fear on New Relationships. From the very beginning of her time in Dream Harbor Jeanie believes something is haunting her—she first suspects a ghost, then a vandal, then a cat, and finally discovers that the culprit is Norman. Each strange noise and incident triggers Jeanie’s worst fears that she’ll never become a new person and never be accepted in Dream Harbor. As these fears escalate, they affect her perspective on the town, her growing friendships, and her romantic connection with Logan. The narrative Jeanie tells herself through the notions of ghosts and vandals is that someone is trying to drive her out of Dream Harbor—a story that reifies her own fears. The hauntings, break-ins, and vandalism only enhance Jeanie’s already present fear of never finding belonging.
