Team Conrad, Team Jeremiah, or Team Belly? Comparing We’ll Always Have Summer by Jenny Han to its TV Adaptation 

In case you haven’t been on any form of social media these past few months, The Summer I Turned Pretty has taken the world by storm. From the constant Team Conrad vs. Team Jeremiah edits on TikTok, to the marketing tactics from brands like Delta Airlines and Swedish Fish who hopped on the endless memes going around, the release of the third season of Jenny Han’s Prime Video adaptation has kept Gen Z glued to their television screens each Wednesday for the past eight weeks, and it’s about time we talk about it. *WARNING* there will be spoilers from both the books and the tv show, so if you haven’t read or watched either, I highly recommend you do so first.  

A bit of background:  

The first book in The Summer I Turned Pretty (TSITP) series was initially published in 2009. I don’t know about the rest of you, but personally, I was three years old, and these books were obviously nowhere on my radar. The subsequent sequels It’s Not Summer Without You and We’ll Always Have Summer came out in 2010 and 2011, with all three becoming New York Times bestsellers. It was several years after when Jenny Han published the first installment in the To All the Boys I Loved Before (TATBILB) trilogy, which was optioned to become a screen adaptation within only weeks of its publication. One year after the last movie in TATBILB came out on Netflix, the first season of TSITP was released as an Amazon Prime Video Original TV Series. The show immediately became a hit and also opened the story of Belly and the Fisher boys to an entirely new demographic who had been too young when the books initially came out (like me). Since then, two more seasons of the show have been released, with each season corresponding to a different book in the trilogy. In terms of the most recent season, the episodes have been released on a weekly basis after the season’s two-episode debut on July 16^th.  

The general synopsis: 

The general plotline of both the book and tv series goes as follows: Isabel “Belly” Conklin has spent every summer of her life at Cousins Beach with her family friends, The Fishers, including brothers Conrad and Jeremiah. Growing up, Belly is obsessed with Conrad, the eldest brother, and secretly crushes on him for years despite knowing it’s futile – Conrad would never see her that way. That is, until the one summer Belly turns sixteen and everything changes, and suddenly she gets caught in a love triangle between both brothers, stirring up her long-buried feelings and complicating, well, everything.  

The books vs. the show: 

If I were to do a book vs. tv show comparison for all three seasons of the show, this blog post would end up being ten pages long, so to combat this, I’m only going to be comparing and contrasting the third season to the third book, We’ll Always Have Summer.  

To start, one of the most significant differences between the book and the show is the time jump. At the start of the third book, Belly is just finishing up her freshman year of college and her and Jeremiah have only been together for roughly two years; at the start of the third season, Belly is finishing up her junior year of college and preparing to be a senior, meaning her and Jeremiah have been together for four years. This makes Jeremiah cheating on Belly with Lacie Barone all the more devastating, as they’ve been dating for almost half a decade when Belly finds out about his infidelity. Despite this, both book and tv show Belly decide to accept Jeremiah’s proposal as an apology, leading them to get prematurely engaged.  

Another big difference between the third book and the third season is Steven and Taylor’s entire relationship. In the books, Steven and Taylor are never officially a couple, much less do they cheat on their partners with each other. One of my favorite added aspects of the show was Taylor and Steven’s relationship, but the cheating storyline was not something I could get behind. To me, it was just an unnecessary plot point that didn’t have any place; Steven and Taylor could have still ended up together without making them commit infidelity. To go off that, Steven’s entire car accident was not something that happened in the books. I understand it happened to add tension and officially ‘break up’ Steven and Taylor, but I was caught off-guard when I first watched that episode.  

Jenny Han has a pattern of creating entirely new characters each season and adding them to the show, (Steven’s girlfriend Shayla in season one and Aunt Julia and Skye in season two), and the third season is no different. The character of Denise, Steven’s co-worker and potential love interest, was crafted specifically for the third season, again to add even more tension between characters (oh Jenny Han). Denise helps serve as an uncomfortable divide between Taylor and Steven’s relationship, as Taylor believes Steven is better suited with someone more ‘driven’ and ‘intelligent’ than she is, although I’d like to argue Taylor is both of those too. Denise also gets brought along to Jeremiah and Belly’s bachelor and bachelorette parties, which is where Denise and Steven end up kissing, yet they ultimately decide they are better off as friends. Essentially homeless after his dad cuts him off in episode ten, Jeremiah also ends up crashing at Denise’s place, and there were hints of a romance between them sprinkled throughout the episode, which although is not what I expected, I’m not sure if I hate it either.  

Although there is a Denise mentioned in the third book, she is only Adam Fisher’s secretary and helps plan Belly and Jeremiah’s wedding. This role is replaced by Kayleigh in the show, who Adam ends up dating after having cheated with her on his late wife, Susannah, while she was undergoing her first round of chemotherapy three years prior to the first season. Being able to put a face to Kayleigh’s name this season reopened that wound for not only the audience, but also Conrad, who knew about the affair and resented his father for it ever since.  

The last notable difference I want to touch on is Belly’s entire venture to Paris. After calling off her wedding with Jeremiah in the show, Belly immediately flies to Paris in an attempt to reclaim her study abroad spot that she gave up due to her engagement with Jeremiah. Although she finds out after the fact that the program has no more open seats, she ends up staying in Paris anyway after a heated phone call with Jeremiah leaves her wanting to find herself without him. In the book, Belly still studies abroad, but she goes to Spain instead, where she receives monthly letters from Conrad that end up rekindling their relationship and ultimately leads to their marriage many years down the road, concluding the trilogy.  

With one episode of the entire series left, fans, including myself, are eagerly waiting to see if the tv show ending will remain true to the book ending. As a Team Conrad fan myself, I’m feeling optimistic, as episode ten ended with Conrad buying a plane ticket to Paris (another difference from the book), most presumably on his way to go see Belly and confess his love once and for all. Alas, only time will tell, but I’ll stay hoping that Belly and Conrad remain endgame and Jenny Han doesn’t break my heart again.