Fifteen-year-old Isabel Conklin spends another summer at her mothers best friend’s beach house. She has gone to this beach house every summer since she was little.
This book follows Isabel’s (nicknamed as Belly) journey with many challenges of her growing up and starting to fall in love. She had many moments where there was conflict between the Fisher brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah, that have affected her relationship between the two. The relationship first changed when the boys started to see her differently when she was acting more mature and had noticeable changes over the years. Belly started to develop feelings for both brothers and had to make the decision to pick which one is best for her. Belly had to be confident and honest with herself and others in order to deal with these complicated situations.
The writing style in this book was amazing and beautifully written. Each detail in the book well describes how it is being a teenager and how hard decisions can be. The characters were super problematic which is what made the book so realistic and intriguing because the teenagers were described as the teenagers they are. The book shows the power of relationships and also goes into the topic of losing a loved one. Belly experiences a lot of grief when Susannah died, which as a reader you can almost feel the sadness she felt in that situation because of how well the author went into detail. Therefore, the author did a great job in keeping the reader hooked and on the edge of their seat.
The author could have done a better job of making the main character have a better personality and make more reasonable choices. For most of the book, it seemed like Belly was making bad decisions for no reason like when she left her boyfriend, Cam, who didn’t even do anything wrong. Sometimes things in the book felt forced to happen to keep the book going which made the reader not have as much love for the main character as they should. Not to mention, Belly wasn’t always a good friend to Taylor which made her seem like a bad person which is not how you would want to portray the protagonist of your story.
All things considered, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” deserves a 4 out of 5 stars because the book had a good plot but forced conflict between the main characters. This book would be recommended to someone who wants to read about love and is a teenage girl.
