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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
Quirky Curmudgeonly Women
Harriet Hates Lemonade follows a rule-loving widow who stumbles into her neighbor’s dangerous marriage, where she’s forced to confront the emotional abuse she once called love. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for the setup came from the idea of a forced collision between two very different kinds of isolation. Harriet’s isolation appears to be self-inflicted, with her rules and rigid ideas of how life should be lived, and Robyn’s isolation is imposed upon her by her controlling, abusive husband. I wanted to take a woman like Harriet, who uses rules and rigidity as a fortress to keep the world at a safe distance, and literally trip her up. The broken ankle caused by a neighbor’s dog is the physical catalyst, but the true setup is Harriet stumbling into a reality she can’t ignore, where she is forced to get out of her comfort zone and become involved in her neighbor’s messy life.
As Harriet begins to peer into the cracks of Robyn’s life, she stops seeing a neighbor in trouble and starts seeing a mirror. I wanted to explore that terrifying moment of cognitive dissonance, where you try to help someone else escape a dangerous situation, only to realize your own relationship was built on the same foundation of control and manipulation. Having experienced the way an abuser’s voice can rewrite your own thoughts, I wanted the setup to be a slow-motion realization. Harriet doesn’t just stumble into Robyn’s marriage; she stumbles into the truth about her own marriage, and she finally has to admit that the rules she thought were protecting her were actually confining and isolating her. I wanted to show that Harriet’s prickly exterior isn’t her personality. It’s a learned survival mechanism from decades of being told she was inadequate. Her journey is about unlearning those lies and reclaiming her own voice.
Harriet is sharp, judgmental, and often difficult—yet deeply compelling. What drew you to writing a protagonist like her?
I’ve always loved quirky, curmudgeonly, initially unlikeable women in literature, characters like Eleanor Oliphant or Olive Kitteridge, who refuse to cushion their opinions to spare anyone’s feelings. With Harriet, I wanted to find that sweet spot where a character is grumpy and rigid, yet still hilarious and human.
Initially, she came to me in snippets, inspired by real-life encounters with high-drama neighbors and overzealous HOA members I met while living in a perfectly manicured neighborhood in Bozeman. But as I dug deeper into her history, I realized that her judgment was actually a shield. She uses rules and high standards to create a sense of safety in a world that has been unkind to her. I loved the challenge of making a woman who can be quite awful into someone the reader would ultimately want to hug. Once I understood her trauma and what made her tick, Harriet took the wheel and started telling the story to me.
Scenes like the grocery bag mix-up or the off-leash dog crusade are comedic, but also revealing. How do you see humor functioning in Harriet’s emotional armor?
Humor is the release valve for both Harriet and the reader. For Harriet, her crusades against neighborhood minor offenses, like off-leash dogs or decorations left up too long, are her way of exerting control when she feels powerless. The humor lies in the absurdity of her rigidity. There’s something inherently funny about the contrast between a perfectly manicured lawn and the high-stakes battle Harriet is willing to wage over it.
But as a writer, the humor is also a tool. It allows me to lead the reader into very dark, heavy territory, like the domestic violence Robyn is facing, without the story feeling like a lecture or a pamphlet. By letting the reader laugh at the grocery bag mix-up or the DNA testing for dog poop suggestion, I’m building a bridge of empathy. The humor allows the reader to take a breath between the heavy moments in the novel. But then, it makes the heavy moments hit harder for two reasons: it fosters a deep empathy for Harriet that makes you truly invested in her, while simultaneously lowering your defenses so the heavy moments hit even harder.
If Harriet could speak to readers directly at the end of the novel, what do you think she would say?
I think she’d start with a huff and a comment about the font utilized in the book, but then she’d get to the heart of it. She’d tell readers that being self-sufficient is a lonely way to live and that the rules won’t actually save you. She’d say that she spent so many years thinking that if she just kept her house tidy and her mouth shut, she was safe, but she wasn’t. She was just alone. She would urge people to invest in their friends, their neighbors, their families. She’d tell readers that getting involved is messy, butting in is risky, and you’ll probably get some dirt on your shoes, but it’s the only thing that really matters. Finally, she’d tell readers to pick up after their dogs, but she’d say it with a wink and a smile.
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Harriet has life all figured out, and she doesn’t hesitate to inform others of their shortcomings. Though her attempts to become president of the homeowner’s association failed, that doesn’t stop her from berating “off-leash-dog-man” or reporting the neighbor who had the audacity to leave their Easter decorations up an entire week past the holiday. The problem is, unbeknownst to her, Harriet’s rigid rules and judgmental opinions are not her own.
Her ordered life plunges into chaos when a twelve-year-old neighbor knocks on Harriet’s door seeking help because the girl’s father is physically abusing her mother. Reluctantly, Harriet comes to her neighbor’s aid and, in the process, recognizes her own insidious abuse which has unwittingly shaped her isolated, rigid existence. To escape her crushing loneliness, she must learn to break free from the patterns of control and isolation that have defined her life and learn to connect with people she previously viewed as heathens.
Harriet Hates Lemonade
Harriet Hates Lemonade follows Harriet Henderson, a rigid and lonely widow in Bozeman, Montana, who breaks her ankle after a showdown with a neighbor’s off-leash dog and suddenly cannot outrun her own life anymore. Stuck at home with her beloved dog Bibbo, she clashes with new neighbor Robyn and Robyn’s young daughter, then slowly notices that something is very wrong inside their house. As Harriet gets pulled into their struggle with an abusive husband and into group meetings at Harmony House, she starts to recognize patterns from her own marriage to Les and the ways she has buried those memories. The story tracks Harriet’s halting attempts to help Robyn find safety, her growing bond with Audrey, and her reluctant softening toward community, small kindnesses, and even a few messy surprises. Underneath the neighborhood gossip and petty HOA battles sits a clear through-line about the cycle of emotional abuse and the work it takes to break it.
I really loved how the writing lets me sit deep inside Harriet’s prickly head. The narration stays close to her thoughts and habits, so her sharp comments about neighbors, librarians, and lemonade stands made me laugh even when she was objectively being awful. Scenes like the humiliating hospital pickup, the underwear-in-the-grocery-bag mix-up, and the crusade against the off-leash dog feel both funny and sad at the same time. The prose itself is clean and unfussy, and the humor feels natural, not forced. I also appreciated the sensory details around aging and the house, from the cave-like wood paneling to Harriet’s irritation with her own body, because they grounded the story in a very tangible midlife reality.
The ideas in the book hit me harder than I expected. The sessions at Harmony House walk through the cycle of narcissistic abuse, love bombing, devaluing, and hoovering, and the explanations are clear without turning the novel into a pamphlet. I found myself wincing as Harriet initially resists the word “abuse” and defends Les with religious language and talk about old-fashioned vows, because that denial felt painfully believable. The story shows how emotional abuse hides inside “rules,” jokes, and backhanded remarks, and why leaving is not a simple act of will. I liked that Robyn’s journey does not follow a neat straight line and that Harriet’s support is clumsy and sometimes controlling, since that messiness mirrors real life. The book also nudged me to think about community and neighborliness, how easy it is to hide behind privacy and routine, and how risky it feels to butt into someone else’s marriage even when every instinct screams that something is wrong.
Harriet Hates Lemonade will suit readers who enjoy character-driven contemporary fiction, small-town settings, and complicated, not-always-likable women who have to unlearn a lifetime of bad lessons. If you have liked books in the vein of A Man Called Ove or Olive Kitteridge, or if you are interested in stories that unpack domestic abuse with compassion and plain language, this novel is a strong pick for you and for book clubs that like big feelings and big discussions.
Pages: 330 | ASIN : B0G2YPGWHV
