The Summer I Turned Pretty Study Guide

Jenny Han was born and grew up in Richmond, Virginia, to Korean immigrant parents. Though she started writing at age seven, she also felt the pressure that she suggests many children of immigrants feel to pursue a “practical” profession, such as medicine or law. But her parents supported her writing aspirations. While working on her MFA at New York University, Han worked in a bookstore in their children’s section and also spent several years as a school librarian. This immersed her in the world of children’s and teen lit. She wrote and published her first novel, Shug, at the same time that she was finishing her masters. Since Shug, Han has written several trilogies, including The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy, Burn for Burn trilogy, and the To All the Boys trilogy. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was Han’s first novel that featured an Asian American protagonist, and it catapulted her to fame. She was involved in adapting and producing all three of the Netflix films. Han lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Teenaged Belly is focused enough on her own problems that she offers few clues as to what’s going on in her wider world. However, parts of the novel do point to it taking place around the time it was written in published, in the late 2000s: for instance, while Belly and her friends have cell phones, the beach house still has a house phone, which is the main line of communication for most people in both Belly and Susannah’s families. The novel also alludes to the anxieties and difficulties surrounding college admissions. Conrad is set to attend Brown University in the fall, an Ivy League school, and Steven’s college tour road trip seems to include mostly other Ivy League schools (Belly specifically asks for a sweatshirt from Princeton). Cousins itself is fictional, but it was inspired by places like Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, summer destinations on the East Coast that are popular with the wealthy in particular.

Jenny Han continues Belly’s story in two follow-up novels, It’s Not Summer Without You and We’ll Always Have Summer. Though Han is best known for her later series To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, she’s been a force in the children’s and young adult literature world since she published her first novel, Shug, in 2006. Han credits her success as a writer of teen romances to J. K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series, which she suggests legitimized children’s literature as a genre and established books for kids as ones worth purchasing in hardcover; and Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series popularized teen romances. Today, more than a decade after The Summer I Turned Pretty was published, teen romances abound. In Places We’ve Never Been by Kasie West, two childhood friends whose families move apart are suddenly thrust back together when their moms plan a summer road trip. The Selection trilogy by Kierra Cass is fantastical, but like The Summer I Turned Pretty, features a love triangle. John Green’s books (Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars) are primarily teen romances, and his protagonists often, like Belly, exhibit a distinctly teenage voice.