The Year is 1987, the place a northern California coastal town. Lizzie Jameson is a thirty-one-year-old coffee shop waitress and a single mother raising three young children in a mobile home, just trying to survive each day. Suddenly she is being pursued by not one but three the owner of a local thrift store and two brothers of a famous publishing family. As she juggles with this aspect of her life, she is also dealing with a baseball-crazy eleven-year-old, a nine-year-old that can't get enough of Encyclopedia Brown, and a seven-year-old daughter that can't get her new puppy to roll over. Sprinkle in a mercurial best friend, a hypochondriac ex-husband, a highly-eccentric 96-year-old nursing home resident, and throw in an eight-stop, seventeen-day Caribbean cruise for good measure, and you have a tasty mixture that is Lizzie's Lemons.