Don’t let the sweet cover of The Pumpkin Spice Cafe fool you. The novel is filled with small-town charm, as author Laurie Gilmore says, but it’s also a spicy romance, quite spicy at times. Welcome to Dream Harbor, a New England twon.
After Jeanie Ellis found her boss dead in his office, her Aunt Dot gave her the Pumpkin Spice Cafe, retired, and went on a cruise. But, Jeanie is intense, and she worries she might not be able to manage the cafe. She worries she might not fit in or find friends in the town, since she was a workaholic without friends. And, she worries about the noises she hears at night. She worries so much that she meets a farmer at the door with a baseball bat.
Logan Anders was only delivering gourds to the cafe. But, he immediately liked Jeanie Ellis. However, Logan had been hurt before, and it happened in front of the entire town. The whole town knows the big burly farmer who was an orphan, and they love him. They certainly don’t want a newcomer to break his heart again. And, “Logan had a habit of letting women unravel him.”
Jeanie is trying to find out who she is away from her old job. Logan is struggling to keep from falling in love again. But, everyone from the bakery owner to the bookstore owner to the book club watch the relationship with glee. They all hope Jeanie’s cafe is successful and that Logan can finally find someone to love.
The Pumpkin Spice Cafe was a TikTok sensation and the TikTok Shop Book of the Year in 2024. The first Dream Harbor romance is a Goldilocks and the Three Bears type of book. It’s probably a little too cozy for some, a little too spicy for others, and just right for some readers. It’s a charming romance between two people struggling to make their lives in a nosy little town.
Laurie Gilmore’s website is https://www.thelauriegilmore.com/
The Pumpkin Spice Cafe by Laurie Gilmore. HarperCollins, 2023. 376p.
FTC Full Disclosure – Library book
One of our daughters has read this very book. I remember her telling me she liked it but when I told her I might like to give it a try she said she wouldn’t recommend it for me because of the spiciness level, a warning she decided she should give me after I’d told her about having liked a book by Ali Hazelwood except for the spice and she gleefully said I’d best stay away from The Pumpkin Spice Cafe then since it was ‘worse’. But here you are Lesa, making is sound all cute and heart warming, albeit with a warning, so I’m wavering again ha ha.
Even the author says this one is spicy, Lindy.It is cute and heartwarming and I’m going to read the next one set in a bookshop. Probably not for you, though, if your daughter is right.
You know, if you had run this review in July, you could have tagged it into all the other pumpkin spice stuff.
You have not lived until you walk by a Kroger endcap, in July, in a very warm Kroger store with bad AC, and smelled the pumpkin spice toilet paper. You go forward a couple of feet and now smell the pumpkin spice bug spray endcap. A couple of more feet and the next end cap is pumpkin spice toilet bowl cleaner and other pumpkin spiced cleaning products.
Your nostrils have just been deeply assaulted and Captain Benson is nowhere to be found.
And, I don’t like pumpkin or pumpkin spice stuff at all, Kevin. I did like the book, but it didn’t dwell on pumpkin stuff.