The Summer I Turned Pretty Book Summary

The Beginning

In The Summer I Turned Pretty, the author Jenny Han narrates the story in the protagonist, Isabel “Belly” Conklin’s voice. Belly spent her summers with her mother, a recently divorced Laurel, and brother, Steven, at the Fisher family’s beach house in a town called Cousins Beach on the Atlantic Coast with her mother’s cancer survivor friend, Susannah Fisher and her teenage sons, Conrad, and Jeremiah Fisher. Belly has a crush on Conrad, the eldest one about to enter college. 

The Summer of Sixteen

The summer Belly turned sixteen was different, as she had become a beautiful young lady. The Fisher boys started noticing her. However, she is disappointed because of Conrad’s foul mood and his lack of acknowledgment of her unsaid yet discernable feelings for him. Family issues and a lousy breakup have made him quit the football team and pushed him into chain smoking. 

The Temporary Rebound

A heartbroken Belly starts dating Cam, a boy she met at a beach party. Cam is a typical well-behaved good boy who doesn’t smoke or drink, but that doesn’t amaze Belly, as she wants him to indulge in risky activities with her. All this while, her feelings for Conrad continue to torment her, and a lurking romantic tension culminates in a moment alone in a car with Conrad, but nothing significant happens.

A Flashback

Throughout the novel, Belly thinks about the past years as flashbacks. One particular memory takes the readers back to the summer when one of her friends, Tylor, visited the beach house. She remembers how Taylor grew distant after that trip when she started considering slowly blossoming Belly as a competition for male attention. That was also the summer when Belly had her first kiss, but it was quite an awkward one with Jeremiah while playing the truth and dare game.

The Declaration

Eventually, and quite obviously, Belly’s attraction towards Cam decreases and is replaced with her visibly intense affection for Conrad. She can no longer keep her feelings to herself and comes clean to Conrad, who rejects her advances instantly, resulting in a fight between the Fisher brothers, as Jeremiah has feelings for Belly. 

The Bitter Truth

The real reason behind Conrad’s rudeness is revealed at this point. Belly gets to know that Susannah’s cancer has relapsed with little time for her to spend in this world. That’s when Belly starts caring for the Fisher household by helping them through their emotional hardship. She lends a listening ear to the Fisher boys and comforts Susannah by promising to look after them after her death.

For One Last Time

On their last day at Cousins Beach, the two families clean up together and spend the evening eating the leftover food. Susannah talks about her decision to stop fighting cancer and live the rest of her life happily. The bittersweet, emotional evening is followed by Belly, Conrad, and Jeremiah’s late-night swim, during which they talk about coming back to the beach house every year, no matter what happens in the future.

The Boy in the Car

A few months later, during the chilly winter, Belly gets a call from a boy in Boston who says he wants to meet her. She sneaks out of her house in the middle of the night to find a car parked near her home, and in the car, she finds Conrad waiting for her. He has come to meet her all the way from Boston. The novel ends with an elated Betty and the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two.