The Summer I Turned Pretty Books in Order

Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy follows Isabel 'Belly' Conklin through the summers that define her life. Every year, Belly, her brother Steven, and their mom Laurel return to Cousins Beach to share a house with Laurel’s best friend Susannah and Susannah’s sons, Conrad and Jeremiah. The books trace what happens when an ordinary summer place becomes the setting for first love, real loss, and the slow shift from childhood into adulthood.

In The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly is fifteen and convinced that summer is when she truly comes alive. She’s spent years nursing a crush on brooding, brilliant Conrad while easygoing Jeremiah has always been the safe, funny one. Over the course of one season, the boys start to see her differently, and Belly is forced to question what she wants from each of them—and who she is without their attention.

It’s Not Summer Without You opens in the shadow of grief. Susannah has died, Laurel and Belly are barely speaking, and Conrad has pulled away from everyone. When he suddenly disappears, Belly and Jeremiah team up to track him down, leading them back to the beach house that used to feel like a refuge and now holds some of their hardest memories.

By We’ll Always Have Summer, Belly and the boys are older, in college, and trying to turn years of history into something like a future. Belly has chosen Jeremiah, and a rash decision pulls the entire family into high-stakes wedding plans that may be more about fear and guilt than joy. With Conrad still in the picture and old feelings never fully settled, the series pushes its characters to be honest about what love really looks like when summer ends.

The setting is as important as any character.

Across all three books, Han leans into small sensory details—the light on the water, late-night drives, boardwalk snacks, the sound of a house full of people—to build a world that feels like the reader’s own remembered summers. The story balances swoony romance with harder topics like divorce, illness, and how parents can fail their kids even when they mean well. Readers who come for the love triangle usually stay for the messy, believable web of family, friendship, and the question of who Belly wants to be when she’s not just the girl at the center of two brothers’ attention. A later screen adaptation brought Cousins Beach to television, but the heart of the trilogy remains on the page: a girl growing up, choosing herself, and learning that even perfect summers can’t last forever.