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Wherever You Go, There You Are
Little Pink Houses follows a forty-seven-year-old former corporate executive who flees Los Angeles for Ambergris Caye, Belize, hoping to reinvent herself, write a novel, and finally live outside the gravitational pull of family damage. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Little pink houses! The abandoned resort in the book is real place on Ambergris Caye, and it’s every bit as fantastical as portrayed in the story. So I knew I wanted to use that as a setting. I kept imagining this little boy there, and because stories rely on tension, I needed the protagonist to be someone with completely different life circumstances, hence a wealthy woman who is childless by choice.
As for the plot itself, I jumped off the true history of the resort, though I did embellish quite a bit. For one, the information available online is sketchy. But the Y2K stuff? It’s a rumor, but as soon as I read it, I knew I could use that to add the humor and quirkiness I wanted to infuse into the novel.
Cole goes to Belize seeking reinvention, but the novel resists that fantasy. What drew you to the idea that starting over is never clean?
To use a cliché, wherever you go, there you are, right? Like Cole, I’m at an age in life where many people start looking back and saying, What if? But we can’t go backward or erase old mistakes. Things in our pasts may fade, but they never go away. All we can do is find peace around them and keep on moving forward.
The island feels humid, alive, and slightly uncanny. What role did Belize play in shaping the emotional tone of the novel?
Belize—Ambergris Caye in particular—completely shaped the novel. It embodies the isolation Cole feels and serves as a juxtaposition of the Hollywood materialism Cole is running away from. Because I wanted to capture the magic of Belize, I leaned into Mayan spirituality which is still very present in the lives of native Belizeans. It’s very tied to the natural world, but because it is so sacred, there’s a lot of mystery surrounding it. So while I used it to add a playful element to the book, I took great pains to be respectful of the culture and its traditions.
The book blends humor, grief, romance, and introspection. What do you hope readers take with them after finishing this novel, and what has stayed with you after writing it?
I like to weave multiple themes into my fiction. This book touches on forgiveness, the damaging power of assumptions, and the subjectivity of memory, to name just a few. The plotline veers into addiction, ecological issues, and cultural dilemmas. Because reading is a very personal journey, I hope readers will find something they need—something healing—whatever that might be.
For me, the biggest lesson is the one Cole learns. That fear can be used as a tool to move forward, rather than stopping you. It takes a lot of courage to put your words out in the world, and very proud of how the novel turned out.
But ultimately, I hope that when people get to the last page, they’ve had so much fun reading that they’re sad to say goodbye.
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Cole Lavetsky is done. Done with Hollywood exploitation, done with her high-stress executive career, and done living in the shadow of her golden-boy twin brother, a former teen heartthrob. With her vintage guitar and the beginnings of a revenge novel, Cole retreats to a rent-free condo on Ambergris Caye, Belize to reinvent herself.
No surprise, island life comes with charms and complications. What Cole didn’t expect was to have her imagination hijacked by a fantastical pink painted resort—now in ruins—and a seven-year-old prodigy, Elías, who “camps” there. When she meets Thatcher Ames, the island’s infamous (and infuriatingly good-looking) philanthropist, Cole reluctantly accepts that she’ll have to team up with him to help the boy.
As meetings on the beach blur into sunset dinners, Cole tells herself she’s got things under control—with Elías, Thatcher, and her book. Until Elías’s grandma, an elderly Mayan mystic, reveals an uncanny insight and Cole begins to fear that in hiding her past, she’s put Elías’s future—and the hearts of everyone involved—in jeopardy.
Darkly funny, achingly candid, and vibrantly atmospheric, Little Pink Houses is a multilayered story about the messy grace we owe ourselves, and the astonishing things that happen when we find the courage to act in the face of fear.
Little Pink Houses
Lisa Binsfeld’s Little Pink Houses follows Cole Lavetsky, a forty-seven-year-old former corporate executive who flees Los Angeles for Ambergris Caye, Belize, hoping to reinvent herself, write a novel, and finally live outside the gravitational pull of family damage. What begins as a midlife reset in a condo by the sea deepens into something more layered: Cole finds herself drawn toward the ruined pink resort nearby, where old choices and long-buried beliefs continue to cast a shadow over the present. Told squarely through Cole’s experience, the novel unfolds as a personal reckoning shaped by grief, family fracture, inheritance, forgiveness, and the stubborn stories people tell themselves in order to survive.
What I liked most was the book’s emotional grain. Cole is not polished into a heroine you are meant to admire from a tasteful distance; she is brittle, funny, vain, wounded, perceptive, and often more frightened than she wants anyone to know. I found that messiness convincing. Binsfeld gives her a voice with bite in it, a voice capable of self-mockery one moment and genuine ache the next, and that made the novel feel lived-in rather than engineered. Belize is not used as a decorative backdrop, either. The island atmosphere, the practical dislocations of daily life, the history of the little pink houses, and the Mayan-inflected spiritual undercurrent all give the story a humid, slightly uncanny shimmer. I kept feeling that the novel understood a hard truth: reinvention is never clean; you drag your old ghosts into paradise with you.
The novel moves between women’s fiction, family drama, and romance without becoming baggy. The central questions are not merely who did what, or what happened in the past, but what care actually requires when love, guilt, and projection get tangled together. The book club questions at the end make clear how much the novel is invested in forgiveness, assumptions, attachment, and the future Cole imagines for Eli, and I felt those tensions while reading; the story kept asking me to revise my sympathies rather than park them in one easy place. The novel occasionally carries a lot at once. Romantic momentum, hidden histories, family scars, and social observations. But even that abundance felt more generous than cluttered. It has the slightly overripe, storm-before-dusk quality of a story that knows life is rarely tidy and declines to fake tidiness.
I’d hand this to readers who like women’s fiction, contemporary fiction, romantic suspense, and book club fiction with a strong sense of place. It should especially appeal to people who enjoy novels about midlife upheaval, buried family history, and the dangerous seduction of starting over somewhere beautiful. It reminded me a bit of Liane Moriarty, but warmer in climate, more bruised in temperament, and more interested in exile, inheritance, and second chances than in pure social satire. Little Pink Houses is a novel for readers who like their escapism sunlit on the surface and knotted underneath.
Pages: 340 | ASIN: B0GPRFK1BH
