The Pumpkin Spice Café

“Jeanie was starting fresh. Jeanie was a new woman. The quaint seaside town of Dream Harbor and its inhabitants knew nothing about her, and she planned to take full advantage of that.”

This early quote summarizes Jeanie’s intentions for moving to Dream Harbor and foreshadows the changes she will try to make as she does so, specifically her obsession with the idea of creating a “New Jeanie.” As Laurie Gilmore reveals progressively more about Jeanie’s past, the author presents this new version of Jeanie as representative of everything her old self wasn’t, highlighting The Feeling of Belonging as Jeanie’s central desire.

“The smoke had barely cleared from the last time he’d crashed and burned in front of the entire town. He wouldn’t be repeating those mistakes anytime soon. Next time he dated someone, he would keep the whole thing far away from Dream Harbor. Maybe one of those nice long-distance relationships everyone was always talking about. Not that he wanted to date Jeanie. He just wanted coffee.”

As with Jeanie, Gilmore often alludes to Logan’s past early in the novel to reveal the degree to which his past trauma still affects him. The author underscores The Effects of Fear on New Relationships through Logan’s conflicting feelings about Jeanie and his attempts to resist his interest in her.

“He blinked. This woman was not the one he met this morning. This woman didn’t need rescuing. For the first time, he wondered who she had been before she moved here, what she’d done outside of Dream Harbor. He’d been so sure she needed him to help, to fix something for her. A bad habit of his.”

As the novel progresses, Logan’s interest in Jeanie continues to surprise him out of his carefully constructed, self-protective life, catalyzing his personal growth and healing. Here, Logan’s internal thoughts emphasize the ways in which his sense of self-worth is rooted in his ability to solve problems for others—a trait Gilmore’s novel frames as ironic, since he can solve everyone’s problems but his own.