Romancing the Stone meets Eat Pray Love in Love, Coffee, and Revolution, TV show runner Stefanie Leder's debut novel, a rom-com mash-up with gravitas. The rambunctious bildungsroman follows naive 21-year-old college dropout Dee Blum from the unfulfilling groves of academe at the University of California, Berkeley, to the steamy underbelly of the coffee farms of Costa Rica.
Dissatisfied with looming law studies, suffocated by a "close-knit" Jewish family, and trapped in a relationship with a domineering boyfriend, Dee dumps them all for the challenge of organizing ecotours for a Bay Area nonprofit through which deep-pocket travelers learn about organic fair-trade coffee. Dee, too, gets an education, though it's not quite what she anticipates.
The engaging novel opens with an adrenaline rush, a "transformative" bungee jump off a bridge in Alajuela, which serves as a striking metaphor for Dee's new life. Having vowed to "resist a romantic entanglement," she is stunned by the "astounding hotness" of Adrián, her bungee jump guide. Her situation becomes more complicated when she thirsts after her on-site mentor, the older, "uncomfortably cute" Matías, an anticapitalist who represents the political views Dee aspires to. It's a tumultuous triangle of desire, deceit, and development.
Add in a high-profile executive director with her own aspirations, two teenagers who expose child labor infractions, and a scholarly revolutionary hero, and Dee must suddenly distinguish between "Cooperative Heaven," "Corporate Hell," and possible fraud.
Disappointment, betrayal, hypocrisy, and romantic hurdles culminate in an action-packed caper before Dee resets her moral compass, empowered and emboldened by self-discovery. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic