The Pumpkin Spice Café

by Laurie Gilmore

Genres: Romance
Pages: 357
Rating:

Synopsis:

When Jeanie’s aunt gifts her the beloved Pumpkin Spice Café in the small town of Dream Harbour, Jeanie jumps at the chance for a fresh start away from her very dull desk job.

Logan is a local farmer who avoids Dream Harbour’s gossip at all costs. But Jeanie’s arrival disrupts Logan’s routine and he wants nothing to do with the irritatingly upbeat new girl, except that he finds himself inexplicably drawn to her.

Will Jeanie’s happy-go-lucky attitude win over the grumpy-but-gorgeous Logan, or has this city girl found the one person in town who won’t fall for her charm, or her pumpkin spice lattes…

Laurie Gilmore’s The Pumpkin Spice Café just… isn’t very good? The characters feel flat, even though they’re given quirks and identifying features: the way they see each other doesn’t match up at all with how they’re thinking and feeling and describing themselves, but not in a way that feels like “whoa, yeah, this person has self-esteem issues”. Jeanie acts neurotic and terrified of everything (and her internal monologue tells us that she is), and Logan reads “perky and cute”. It feels like two paper cutouts being pressed together, “Now kiss!”

The insta-love doesn’t help.

It mostly feels like someone wanting to write a small town romance and then making really, really sure that we know we’re in a small, quirky town. It’s small! And quirky! Don’t you know that it’s small and quirky? Look at how small and quirky it is!

There are several sex scenes, which I completely skimmed because they didn’t really advance characterisation much, and I did not believe at all in the chemistry between them, because I kept being told how much chemistry there was.

Some reviews are saying it’s a Hallmark movie in book form, and yeah, I see that.

Rating: 1/5