This is for the Adapt/Camel cbr14bingo square; the book and its sequels have been adapted into a series on Amazon Prime, and narrator Isabel ‘Belly’ Conklin has to adapt to her changing body and growing up and the things and people she’s taken for granted changing around her.
“My boy was a montage / A slow-motion, love potion/ jumping off things in the ocean / I broke his heart cause he was nice”, sings Taylor Swift on ‘Midnight Rain’, the sixth track of her new album. And this is very much the vibe of The Summer I Turned Pretty (indeed, the Amazon Prime series based on this book is soundtracked by earlier Swift songs). I’m a sucker for a YA text with ‘summer’ in the title, and I liked this show; there’s a lot of windswept shoreline and night swimming and dreamy gazing, but it’s a little sharp and funny, and the adult characters are fully realised (or at least played by good enough actors to make it seem that way).
The book, however, is more of a montage than a novel–Belly Conklin, the narrator, is turning 16, and is mainly a longing stare, whether it’s at Conrad Fisher who is 18 and brooding and dreamy or into the past at fond memories of Conrad Fisher’s attention (the chapters switch between the present and flashbacks). Conrad has a brother, Jeremiah, who is lively and cheeky and unreliable, and a mother, Susannah, who is Belly’s mother’s college friend with money and a summer house at Cousins Beach, Massachusetts. The Conklins and the Fishers have been spending summers together for as long as anyone can remember, and Susannah is cutely–or creepily–invested in having her college friend’s daughter marry one of her sons (it doesn’t really seem to matter which one).
When Belly turns 16 she starts to resent her old status as a tag-along to the boys’ adventures, and wants to make summer memories of her own–she also meets a boy she hasn’t known since diapers to flirt with and kiss, but he fades out of the picture rather quickly (he seems like a very nice chap; he wants to work in whale conservation when he grows up, whereas Conrad will probably end up miserably in finance or law and Jeremiah is probably doomed to spend four years in a frat house and then relive his glory days forever), as does Belly’s only female friend in the book Taylor who is considered shallow and boy-crazy despite the fact that she basically only acts out Belly’s secret desires.
The narrative is then hammered into a love triangle between Belly and the Fisher brothers, which I believe continues throughout the series, interspersed with swimming and beach bonfires and drive-in movies and whatnot. This is all more compelling in the series, where the landscapes are beautiful and there’s a little more to Belly than her romantic choices, and a sense of genuine tension between the brothers that transcends any competition over Belly as well as a bond forged through a experience we only gradually find out about (which in the book is more hinted at than developed).
The Summer I Turned Pretty came out around the same time as Twilight, and there are definite similarities–not just in the love triangle but the pervading sense of chastity, as well as the idea that decisions you make when you’re 16 must be life-defining. I really enjoyed the Han’s later To All the Boys I Loved Before (2014) a lot (both the book and the Netflix film) and its sequels were alright. The love triangle involving brothers seems odd and unlikely to me (if anyone’s been in a situation like that, and wants to contradict me, please comment below! I’m happy to accept it’s a thing that happens in real life, and can happen without the sort of drama that ends up on problem pages or the Vampire Diaries, but I’m genuinely interested to know how common this dynamic is!) but there could be more exploration of whether it’s the Fisher family unit itself that Belly wants to be a part of, or if she’s clinging to her childhood crush because moving beyond it, and viewing herself as ‘pretty’ with all that (both positively and negatively) implies outside the safety of the summer house, is a source of anxiety.
Overall, it’s alright–I might read the sequels if I find them cheaply. That sounds like damning with faint praise, I know–I did enjoy reading it, and I recommend it for anyone who wants something lightly breezy and summery, and I’m intrigued enough to read more, and more by the same author (I think her books have got a lot better since 2009)–but I liked the show more. Maybe, despite liking Taylor Swift, and being a sucker for all things summery and nostalgic and rite of passagey, it’s just that I’m not the target demographic.