There is a particular kind of reading experience that belongs almost exclusively to summer. Not the breezy, disposable sort where the words slide off you like tanning oil, but the kind that seeps in through the skin and stays there, quietly rearranging something in your chest that you didn’t know needed rearranging. Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty is exactly that kind of book. I came to it later than most of its devotees, and I’ll admit I came with the mildly condescending skepticism that critics sometimes carry toward YA contemporary romance. What I found disarmed me completely.
Han’s trilogy, first published in 2009 and then catapulted to stratospheric cultural heights after Amazon’s Prime Video adaptation pulled in over 70 million viewers within 70 days of its third season, is not simply a love triangle story. It is a meditation on the cruelty of time, on how a single place can hold an entire childhood in its pockets, and on how adolescence carries a grief of its own, even before anything terrible has happened. Belly Conklin’s summers at Cousins Beach are drawn with such precision that readers don’t merely visit those shores; they remember them, the way one remembers a place from one’s own past. That is the novel’s most quietly devastating achievement.
I have spent decades as a reader and reviewer sorting through the vast, sometimes dazzling, sometimes deeply mediocre landscape of contemporary fiction. What I find most interesting about books like The Summer I Turned Pretty is not simply their popularity but the precise emotional need they answer. They are books about the moment before you are fully formed, when every feeling seems oceanic, when the geography of your childhood is still a living organism, and when love has not yet been worn smooth by experience. They are, in short, about everything.
What follows is not a casual list. These seventeen books are chosen with deliberate care, grouped by the type of reader I believe will find each one most resonant. The connections between them and Han’s trilogy are sometimes structural, sometimes tonal, and sometimes simply a matter of the same rare quality: the ability to make you ache for something you never had.
For Readers Who Fall in Love with a Place Before They Fall in Love with a Person
There is a category of fiction, too rarely discussed in serious criticism, where setting is not backdrop but protagonist. Han understood this intuitively. Cousins Beach is not where the story happens; it is the story. The books below share this essential quality. They are built around places that generate feeling the way certain coastlines generate weather.
Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
I want to be precise about why this book belongs at the top of this list: it is the most technically accomplished novel in this entire category for readers seeking an adult companion to Han’s world. Fortune, formerly an award-winning journalist at publications like The Globe and Mail and Toronto Life, brings a discipline to her prose that is rare in commercial romance. Her Barry’s Bay, set in Ontario’s cottage country, functions with the same haunting specificity as Cousins Beach. You do not merely visit it; you feel its particular quality of light, the chill of the lake, the summer sounds of a childhood that has since closed its doors.
The structure is everything here. Fortune alternates between six summers of Percy and Sam’s deepening bond and a single present-day weekend when Percy returns for a funeral. The past pulls against the present with genuine architectural tension. What distinguishes this from comparable works is the moral weight Fortune gives to both characters’ missteps. These are not two people kept apart by misunderstanding alone; they are kept apart by character flaws they must actually reckon with. For readers who found the Fisher brothers compelling precisely because they were imperfect, Percy and Sam offer that same combination of affection and frustration.
Every Summer After became a New York Times bestseller, debuting in 2022, and it is one of the few beach reads I have recommended to literary fiction readers without qualification.
To read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants as merely a friendship novel is to miss what Brashares is actually doing. Published in 2001, this book was conducting an elegant argument about the geography of the self: how the places that scatter us over a summer are also the places that define us, and how friendship is a kind of portable homeland. Carmen in South Carolina, Lena in Greece, Bridget at soccer camp in Baja, and Tibby remaining at home in Bethesda each experience a different landscape, and those landscapes act on them like pressure on stone.
What connects this to Han’s work is not merely the summer setting or the adolescent voice but something more structural: both novels understand that the real drama of being sixteen is not romantic. It is the drama of discovering that the world does not have your shape. Brashares writes Lena’s experience in Greece with a restraint and a visual precision that I find genuinely beautiful. The novel does not sentimentalize growing up. It regards it with a clear, compassionate eye, and the result is a book that has not dated in the decades since its publication.
Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen
Sarah Dessen has been doing what Jenny Han does, and doing it brilliantly, since the late 1990s. She is one of the most underappreciated serious writers in American YA fiction, and Along for the Ride, published in 2009 (the same year as Han’s first installment), is among her finest work. Auden’s summer in the beach town of Colby, spending her father’s remarriage at his beachside home, is a summer of insomnia, bicycle riding at midnight, and an unlikely romance with Eli, a boy grieving a tragedy he cannot name.
What Dessen does here that Han also does, and that so few writers of either YA or adult fiction manage, is hold grief and joy in the same hand without letting either contaminate the other. Auden is funny, brittle, and genuinely intellectual in ways that feel earned rather than performed. Dessen trusts her readers to be smarter than the genre’s reputation suggests they need to be. This is a book for Belly Conklin readers who also want something with a slightly sharper psychological edge.
The Summer of Broken Rules by K.L. Walther
Published in 2022, this novel carries a particular kind of grief at its center. Meredith is attending her cousin’s wedding on Martha’s Vineyard for the first time since the death of her sister, Claire. The setting is rendered with the loving precision of someone who has spent summers on the island and knows exactly how the light falls and how the wind smells off the water. Walther structures the romance around a family-wide game of Assassin played across the wedding weekend, which sounds gimmicky but is deployed with genuine psychological intelligence. The game externalizes something that the characters cannot say directly: that love and loss are always tracking each other, always circling, never quite catching up.
This is a quieter, more elegiac book than some on this list, and that is precisely why it belongs here. It reads like something Belly Conklin might have written about her own summers, had she been a little more melancholy and a little more prone to looking at the horizon.
For Readers Who Understand That Slow Burns Are the Only Burns Worth Having
The love triangle in The Summer I Turned Pretty is not really about Conrad versus Jeremiah. It is about the two versions of a life Belly might inhabit, and the unbearable luxury of having to choose. The tension is romantic, yes, but its engine is something deeper: the ache of potential, of futures not yet foreclosed. The books below share this quality. They are slow burns in the truest sense, meaning that the heat they generate accumulates rather than ignites.
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
Emily Henry has become the dominant voice in contemporary American romance in a way that is genuinely literary in its ambitions, even as it operates comfortably within popular genre conventions. People We Meet on Vacation, published in 2021, is arguably her best constructed novel. Poppy and Alex are best friends who have taken a vacation together every summer for ten years. Two years ago, something happened that ended their friendship. The novel alternates between those past summers and the present-day attempt to repair what was broken.
The dual timeline structure is one Henry shares with Fortune and, in spirit, with Han. But Henry’s particular gift is dialogue. Her characters talk in the way people who love each other but cannot say so actually talk: in codes, in deflections, in jokes that carry more weight than the conversation around them. Poppy and Alex are not simply a romance; they are a relationship between two people who have been each other’s primary emotional world for a decade. That history has density and texture that conventional romance rarely achieves. For The Summer I Turned Pretty readers who want to feel what Belly and Conrad might have been to each other had they been allowed to grow up together, this is your book.
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
I am aware that Anna and the French Kiss, first published in 2010, attracts strong opinions. Some readers find its setup contrived, its heroine occasionally exasperating, its Paris too much like a postcard. They are not wrong about any of these things. And yet the novel accomplishes something that more technically rigorous works often fail to do: it renders the specific texture of wanting someone you cannot have with absolute fidelity.
Étienne St. Clair is, by any rational standard, an implausible creature: British-American accent, literary sensibility, inexplicable magnetism, and the patience of a saint. But Perkins understands that fiction’s job is not to be realistic; it is to be emotionally true. The frustration of Anna’s situation, stranded at an American boarding school in Paris while Étienne remains with his girlfriend, captures the particular exquisite misery of proximity-without-permission in a way that Han herself has praised. Perkins’s Paris, like Han’s Cousins Beach, is rendered with enough sensory specificity to function as more than setting. It becomes the emotional atmosphere in which the slow burn breathes.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han
It would be critical negligence to exclude Han’s own companion series from this list. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, published in 2014 and the novel that Han has said she was emboldened to write after the success of the Cousins Beach trilogy, offers what is in some ways a more contained and structurally precise version of the romantic tension her earlier series managed over three volumes. Lara Jean Song Covey is a different kind of protagonist from Belly: more inward, more bookish, more aware of the gap between her interior life and her exterior presentation.
The fake-dating premise that drives the plot is, in Han’s hands, less a device than a container for a genuine question: what does it mean to be known by someone, and what is the terror and the relief of allowing yourself to be? The novel became a Netflix film in 2018 that the streaming service described as one of its most-viewed original films, attracting over 80 million subscribers. But the book was doing its work quietly and precisely long before the cameras arrived.
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith
Jennifer E. Smith is a writer of considerable craft who operates at the literary intersection of romantic timing and emotional readiness. This 2012 novel takes place across roughly twenty-four hours: Hadley misses her flight, meets Oliver in the airport, and they share a transatlantic crossing that is one of the most convincingly rendered long-form conversations in YA fiction. The novel then unfolds across a single day in London.
What Smith understands, and what makes this feel spiritually connected to Han’s work, is that the problem of being young and in love is not usually the drama of the relationship itself. It is the drama of being ready. Hadley is not ready, for reasons the novel gradually discloses. Oliver has his own readiness problem. Their conversation across the Atlantic is about everything except what it is actually about, and Smith renders that displacement with real intelligence. For The Summer I Turned Pretty readers who found the quieter, more interior chapters of Han’s trilogy more compelling than the louder romantic confrontations, this is the novel.
For Readers Who Know That Summer and Grief Are Secretly the Same Season
The Summer I Turned Pretty is not a grief novel in the conventional sense, but Susannah’s illness runs beneath every page of the trilogy like an underground current. The love story is inseparable from loss. The summers at Cousins Beach are precious not despite their impermanence but because of it. The novels below understand this entanglement of summer and mourning. They do not use grief as a plot device; they use it as an atmosphere, the way Han does.
The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen
The Truth About Forever is, in my view, the finest novel Dessen has written, and it contains her most searching treatment of loss. Macy Queen is spending her summer in a kind of suspended animation after the death of her father. She works a catering job with a group of wild, creative, gloriously undisciplined people, and falls into an unexpected romance with Wes, an artist who, like her, is navigating a loss he has not fully processed.
Dessen’s prose here is more restrained and more precise than in some of her earlier work. She understands something that Han also grasps: that grief, especially in adolescence, does not announce itself. It seeps in through the ordinary. Macy does not mourn in scenes of dramatic weeping. She mourns by being unable to make decisions, by wearing her competence like armor, by flinching from joy because joy is the thing that was interrupted. This is emotionally sophisticated writing disguised as light summer fiction, which is the hardest kind to pull off. Strongly recommended for readers who felt the Susannah plotline was the emotional center of Han’s trilogy.
Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson
Morgan Matson is a reliably pleasurable writer, and Since You’ve Been Gone, published in 2014, is her most emotionally complex novel. Emily’s best friend Sloane has vanished without explanation, leaving behind only a list of tasks for Emily to complete over the summer: kiss a stranger, go skinny dipping, ride a horse, and so forth. The novel operates on a double register: the lightness of the summer adventure and the genuine anguish of a friendship that has inexplicably gone silent.
What lifts this above a standard YA adventure is Matson’s attentiveness to the specific misery of losing a friend, which she treats with the same seriousness that Han brings to romantic loss. The friendship at the center of The Summer I Turned Pretty is not between Belly and the Fisher brothers; it is between Belly and the summers themselves, between Belly and the version of herself that Cousins Beach allows her to be. Matson understands that same kind of identity-tied-to-relationship grief and renders it with warmth and intelligence.
Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour by Morgan Matson
Published in 2010, this is the novel I most often recommend to readers who want the emotional texture of Han’s work delivered through a different formal vehicle. Amy is driving from California to Connecticut after her family’s dissolution and her father’s death. Roger is the college boy her mother has recruited to share the driving. The road trip structure, with its accumulating intimacy and shifting geography, gives Matson a canvas that is both wider and more intimate than the fixed summer setting of most comparable fiction.
The map of America that unscrolls beneath Amy and Roger’s journey is emotionally charged in the way that Cousins Beach is emotionally charged: every town they pass through, every detour from their planned route, carries the weight of what Amy is carrying internally. The romance is genuinely sweet without being saccharine, and Matson captures the specific consolation of movement when your interior world has become unnavigable. This is a road trip novel that is secretly a grief novel that is secretly a love story, which is to say, it is exactly as layered as it needs to be.
Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
I include Firefly Lane, first published in 2008, not as a YA recommendation but as a passage point for readers who have loved the Belly-Susannah relationship and wish to see what that particular emotional bond, the friendship between a girl and an older woman who is both mentor and mother figure, looks like when rendered with greater literary ambition. Hannah’s novel is primarily about two women, Kate and Tully, whose decades-long friendship is the structural spine of the narrative.
This is a more demanding novel than the others on this list, requiring more patience from its readers and offering more complexity in return. Hannah’s prose can be uneven, and the sentimentality she employs toward the ending strikes some critics as excessive. I would argue that she earns it. For readers who found the scenes between Belly and Susannah the most piercing in Han’s trilogy, this is the book you have been looking for without knowing it.
For Readers Ready to Graduate From YA Without Leaving Its Heart Behind
A particular affliction strikes devoted readers of YA contemporary romance when they arrive at a certain age: the realization that the emotional registers they loved have not translated intact into the adult fiction they have been told to prefer. The books below are, in the truest sense, grown-up versions of the summer novel. They carry the same emotional grammar as Han’s trilogy while offering more formal complexity, more textured psychology, and in some cases, more fully realized prose.
Beach Read by Emily Henry
Beach Read, Henry’s 2020 debut, is a formally clever piece of work: two writers, a literary fiction author and a romance novelist, each struggling with a crisis of faith in their genre, end up as neighbors for a summer and propose to write each other’s books. The meta-commentary on genre is done with a light hand, and Henry is too smart a writer to let it overwhelm the love story at the center. What she does beautifully is show how genre prejudice, in fiction as in life, can be a form of self-protection.
January, the romance novelist, cannot write romance after her father’s death. Gus, the literary fiction writer, cannot write his serious novel after his own losses. They are both stuck, and the summer gives them each enough friction and enough warmth to become unstuck. For The Summer I Turned Pretty readers who want to feel what Han’s emotional world would look like through a more self-aware, adult lens, Beach Read is the most satisfying answer currently available.
Meet Me at the Lake by Carley Fortune
Fortune’s second novel, published in 2023, is in some ways even more architecturally complex than Every Summer After. Fern Brookbanks had a single extraordinary day with Will Baxter at a dock on Lake Muskoka three years ago. They made a plan to meet at that same place the following year. Will did not show. Now he has appeared at the resort Fern has inherited, and the novel spins between the past day that defined them and the present week that must resolve what that day began.
Fortune is one of those writers, and they are rare, who can generate romantic tension not through miscommunication or external obstacle but through the sheer weight of feeling between two people who are not ready to act on it. The lake in this novel functions with precisely the same emotional authority that the ocean functions in Han’s trilogy. It is not scenery. It is a witness. For readers who have been wondering what Han might have written had she turned her attention to adults navigating the same kinds of summer longings, Fortune’s second novel is as close an answer as the current literary landscape offers.
One Day in December by Josie Silver
Silver’s 2018 debut is a structured gamble: the romantic tension between Laurie and Jack unfolds not over a single summer but over ten years, anchored by a chance sighting through a bus window in December that neither character can forget. What makes this feel connected to the Han universe, despite its wintery beginnings, is the quality of time it inhabits. This is a novel about the way a single moment can colonize years, about how the people we almost had define us as much as the ones we actually love.
Silver’s prose is warmer and less stylized than Henry’s but very sure-footed, and the dual perspective (Laurie and Jack both narrate) creates the same kind of productive dramatic irony that Han generates by keeping Conrad’s interiority largely opaque through the first novel. The reader knows things each character does not, and that knowledge makes every near-miss genuinely painful rather than merely frustrating.
For Readers Who Need Their Summer Stories to Say Something Larger About Who We Are
The most underestimated quality of The Summer I Turned Pretty is its seriousness. Beneath the love triangle, beneath the beach house and the summer parties, Han is conducting an argument about how we form identity: how we grow into ourselves not in our ordinary lives but in the extraordinary spaces where ordinary rules do not apply. The summer is a laboratory. The beach is a place where you can be someone you are not quite yet. The novels below share this ambition. They are not content to tell you about first love. They want to tell you what first love tells us.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I include this 2012 novel, a Printz Award winner, not because it shares the conventional trappings of summer beach romance but because it shares something far more essential: the sense that a summer, and a friendship formed within it, can be the hinge on which an entire self turns. Aristotle and Dante’s relationship, developing over years and summers in El Paso during the 1980s, is rendered in prose of such concentrated beauty that I find myself returning to certain passages the way one returns to certain coastlines.
Sáenz writes about what it means to be on the threshold of knowing something true about yourself but not yet having the language or the courage for it. This is what Han writes about too, however different the surface material. Belly is becoming someone at Cousins Beach. Aristotle is becoming someone in the desert summer. The landscapes are polar opposites and the experiences are profoundly different, but the emotional truth is the same: adolescence is not a phase you pass through. It is a country you discover, and the summer is its most vivid season.
Forever by Judy Blume
I cannot write seriously about books like The Summer I Turned Pretty without acknowledging the writer who, more than anyone else, made honest fiction about adolescent experience in America possible. Judy Blume’s Forever, published in 1975 and still controversial in enough school districts to make any critic’s blood pressure rise, is the original summer coming-of-age novel in the most precise sense: it is about a first love that is real and physical and consequential, told without condescension or moral alarm.
Katherine and Michael meet at a New Year’s Eve party and spend a winter and a summer in a relationship that ends, as first relationships must, not with drama but with the quiet inevitability of two people growing in different directions. Blume’s refusal to punish her characters for their physical relationship was radical in 1975 and, in certain corners of American culture, remains so. What Han does half a century later, treating Belly’s desires and choices with seriousness and respect, is in direct lineage from Blume’s insistence that young women’s inner lives are worthy of literary attention. To read Forever alongside The Summer I Turned Pretty is to understand where Han’s seriousness comes from.
A Final Word
Reading through these seventeen novels, I am struck again by what the summer fiction genre at its best is actually doing. It is not escapism, or not merely escapism. It is a formal experiment in concentrated time: what happens when you place people in a world with an expiration date, when the calendar is visible from the first page, when everyone knows that September is coming?
Han’s genius, and it is a genuine and considered genius, is that she understood this formal pressure and used it. The impermanence of Cousins Beach is not the backdrop of the trilogy. It is its engine. Every book on this list, in its own way, understands the same thing. The best summer novels are love stories told under deadline, and that is why they feel so urgent, so vivid, and so difficult to put down. Whether you work through this list from top to bottom or wander through it by mood and instinct, you will find in each of these novels what you found in Han’s trilogy: the sense that someone has caught something true and transient in the net of their prose, and given it to you to hold for a while, before summer ends.