A coming-of-age love story! The Summer I Turned Pretty is a highly anticipated adaptation of a trilogy written by Jenny Han that explores love, friendship and family.
The first season will introduce viewers to Belly, who catches the eye of her longtime friends Conrad Fisher and Jeremiah Fisher. The brothers develop an interest in Belly after spending their summers at the beach together.
For Han, 41, the long wait to bring the story to screen made her worry about how longtime fans would react to the series. “I just really want them to feel satisfied by the long wait and feel like the story has come to life in the way that they were hoping for. I hope fans swoon a lot,” the author told Entertainment Weekly in March 2022. “The first time I walked on set, I cried.”
The Virginia native noted that she wasn’t looking to recreate the series straight from the page.
“It’s about distilling what are the most important pieces of the story, and I hinged it around those big moments that I thought were really important to the fans,” Han, who also wrote the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series, added. “I continually asked myself, what do the fans care most about, what do they want to see the most, what are those big tentpole moments, and trying to make sure that I deliver those while still allowing myself room to expand and find new ways into the story.”
Even though the story may introduce new stories, Han teased that readers were taken into account during the development process. “We’ll see the night swims and big crushes and all those sort of big, epic love moments this season. I did try to drop in a lot of Easter eggs throughout the series for the fans of the books,” she hinted. “It’s all the thrill and excitement of first love and what it’s like to really love someone from afar your whole life and then suddenly be interacting with them in a new way.”
Han also pointed out that The Summer I Turned Pretty will explore the different kinds of love — including platonic connections.
“It really is about growing up and coming into your own and that loss of innocence. The first season is really just the beginning of it,” Han continued. “When I started writing it, I realized I needed more space to tell the story. I feel the same way about TV — I think that novels actually lend themselves really well to TV because you just get a lot more time to really delve into the characters and be with them on their journey.”
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