The Bibliophile's Bookshelf

This month’s Saturday Spotlight theme is beach reads! So far, I have shared A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry, We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, and Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen. You can find those posts here, here, and here.

For the final beach read, I am sharing The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han!

This post is going to be more of a joint post about both the show and the book. I love the show and I quite enjoyed the book, too.

Personally I think the show is better than the book! Jenny Han also wrote To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and I think she is better at writing screenplays than novels. There is just something that flows better in the show than the book.

The final season of the show is also coming out in a couple of weeks and I am so excited!

The book is a good, quick read. Belly, the main character, can be kind of an obnoxious character, but I didn’t think she was too bad. She did break up a family, though, which is one of my least favorite things in media.

The book was very simple. It was good and entertaining, but not super deep and the writing was simple. The show is much better at diving into characters and storylines.

Also, the setting is just gorgeous! I would love to live in a coastal town, and Cousins sounds like the most wonderful place to live ever!

This is a perfect summer romance, both the book and the show. The show is something my entire family watches together and we all adore it (and ship Belly and Conrad hard!). The book trilogy is perfect for at the beach or on a nice vacation- a perfect escape but doesn’t take too much from you!

Happy reading and/or watching!

Summary:

Belly measures her life in summers. Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer, a place away from the beach house, away from Susannah, and most importantly, away from Jeremiah and Conrad. They are the boys that Belly has known since her very first summer—they have been her brother figures, her crushes, and everything in between. But one summer, one terrible and wonderful summer, the more everything changes, the more it all ends up just the way it should have been all along.