The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han

Beach Week Book Three! This one is all about spending summers at a beach house and finding yourself old enough for that first love. Told in retrospectives of Belly’s past summers you’ll get to know her and why this summer is so very important…Enjoy the sun, sand, and the love…

BookTalk

Isabel, a.k.a. Belly, a.k.a. Belly Button spends every summer at a beach house with her mom and brother, as well as her mom’s best friend and her two sons. Belly lives for the summer, discounting the rest of the year (and the boys that come with it) in favor of the summer months she spends in Cousin’s Cove. Every previous summer has led Belly to this turning point in her life…The summer she turned pretty. Belly is entering adulthood and is hungry for the adventures and relationships that come with it. Drunk on the pleasure of finally having boys notice her, she focuses all of her attention on her first loves…the Beck boys…to whom she’s been a surrogate little sister. Belly is soon to learn that with the joys of adulthood also come the hardships, First love is not always what it seems, and being self-aware and self-absorbed are not the same thing. Belly is in for one hot summer…the summer that changed everything.

Review

This book should be in the dictionary next to ‘Summer Read’. It’s full of cute guys, first loves, and the dramas of growing up all set in the quintessential beach house. That being said, The Summer I Turned Pretty was not what I was expecting. I read a review of the title on GReads! and put it in my TBR pile. I guess I assumed that this book would be a light beach read about a summer where everything came together. I was expecting a first love story…something simple and sweet.

That is not this book.

I completely agree with Ginger when she says you continue to think about the characters long after this book is over. I felt like the whole point of the book was character development…that by the last page I was really just getting geared up for the story. The story is told alternately from the current summer (the summer she turns pretty) and in flashbacks to previous tween summers. I don’t know that I understood where the book was going in the beginning. I found myself wondering if the title was more appropriate for a tween audience, that it was a little young for my personal taste. What became apparent later in the book was that Han was slowly feeding me a history of this beach-side group. So while this was a Super Summery read…it was turning into a book that was about more than light-summer-fun stuff. What I was learning from the flashbacks soon began to color my understanding of the present time, giving the story depth beyond the surface storyline.

This understanding really helped me see that I was watching Belly mature before my eyes. Be warned, Belly is very much immature for the better part of this novel. She whines, she thinks everything is about her…that the world simultaneously revolves around her and yet is shafting her at the same time. No need to worry, by the end of the book Belly has perspective but because this understanding happens so late in the text, I felt like I was just gearing up for the meat of the story.

This book reads almost like a prequel. You intimately get to know all of the characters but the main plot points of the story are just beginning. Good thing the trilogy is already finished and published…you’ll be ready to move onto book two right away.

Rating: 7/10

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