Jenny Han, ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ author, talks the show’s changes and what couple she sees together in the end.
This story contains spoilers from Season 1 of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Those who read Jenny Han’s 2009 novel “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” and the two books that followed, knew a bit of what to expect from the series, which dropped its first season on Friday, June 17. The premise was simple: A young girl, Belly, and her mom go to a beach house every summer and stay with the mother’s best friend and her sons. Bely has always had a crush on one of the boys, Conrad, and is best friends with his brother, Jeremiah. Ahead of her 16th birthday, she returned back to the beach once again and they all took notice that she was no longer a little girl. The seven-episode series follows the same realm with newcomer Lola Tung portraying Belly.
“I really wanted to find actors that felt real and natural and fresh. There’s a feeling of discovery about that. The linchpin was going to be Belly because everything hangs around her. She’s the main character and so it was the most important that we found our right Belly,” Han tells Variety. “Lola had this freshness to her. She was still 18 when we cast her and she turned 18 on the show, but I think it’s really hard to manufacture a kind of innocence or newness to things. This is our first part and she had never done it before. There’s so many meta elements to that — to Belly’s big summer and Lola’s big summer.”
Here, the author and co-showrunner dives more into the differences between the book series and the TV show, her vision for future seasons and those incredible needle drops. When you were adapting the book, how much pressure did you feel when it came to who Belly chose romantically at what point in her life? It’s a bit of a balancing act, because I really had to weigh what the fans are expecting with where the show is going creatively and find that balance. My priority has always been that I want fans of the book to feel really satisfied by the story we’re telling, but also for them to know that this is an adaptation in a new medium, so it’s not going to be exactly the same. I think those are sort of the two things that are always in my head. In the first book, Belly turned down Jeremiah. In this, she gave him a shot and they were together. Was there a chance that she was going to be with Jeremiah at the end of Season 1 instead of kissing Conrad? Yeah, that was kind of moved up in the first season. When I was doing Jeremiah’s POV in the second book, I was very much swayed in all directions.
