The Summer I Turned Pretty Review

The Summer I Turned Pretty

Written by Jenny Han
# of Pages: 276

Average Rating: 4.04 / 5
My Rating: 4 / 5

Read in August 2013

Summary

This book is about a 15 (almost 16) year-old named Belly, who spends every summer at Beck's beach house with her sons - Jeremiah and Conrad. Conrad is around 18 and is older than Belly's brother Steven by 8 months, who is older than Jeremiah by about a year. This makes Belly the youngest, and also the only girl among these guys. However, this summer changes everything. The boys don't see Belly as a little kid anymore as she has started developing into a woman, and things within each of their families are changing. This is a contemporary book about love and heartbreak, but also something in-between. How much can a friendship go though before it is broken?

My Thoughts

This book is the first in a trilogy that I have owned for a while, but have just started getting into. I don't really enjoy trilogy's (especially when they are contemporary) because I find they start to get repetitive and boring. However, I did not find that this was happening with this book, as the plot is so broad it can go anywhere, leaving many possibilites for the next two books.

In this novel there are flashbacks to other summers that Belly has had, and having those memories included added a lot to the story. Without having these flashbacks, you would not have known the whole history of her family or with the Fisher family, which wouldn't have made the story the same.

The only negative thing that I can say about this book was that I wasn't a dan of the character names. They were random like Belly, Laurel, or something along those lines, to average names such as Steven and Taylor. I don't mean to be rude when saying that, it was just having the main character's name being Belly made it harder for me to concentrate fully on the story, because I kept thinking about naming their child after a body part.

Overall, this book might be in my top five list of favourite contemporaries. At the beginning it seems like it might be very cliche, but it has many elements that you wouldn't expect. This book made me laugh, broke my heart, and made me want to go to the beach - but I enjoyed every second of it!