‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Show Differences: Time Jump & More

In the books, there wasn’t as much of a gap between Belly getting together with Jeremiah and their getting engaged in college at Finch. Belly was finishing her freshman year in the books with Jere finishing his sophomore year, so they had planned to move into an apartment together to finish out college as a married couple.

Belly does study abroad in the third book, but it is after she decides to call off her wedding to Jeremiah. In fact, her time studying abroad is when she starts to get letters from Conrad in the books. She also studied abroad in Spain, not Paris.

In the show, Belly finds out she got off the waitlist for a Paris study abroad program she applied to, and it will take place her fall semester senior year. She hesitates to tell Jeremiah because she finds out he will have to stay at Finch one more semester since his credits aren’t concluded for his major, but he encourages her to go.

While Steven and Taylor did kiss in Season 1 like in Jenny Han’s first book, the romance between them stopped there. Season 3 finds them in a rocky relationship of ups and downs where they break up and get back together and then proceed to cheat on their partners with each other.

In the books, Conrad’s transfer to Stanford isn’t mentioned until the third book. He attended Brown University in the first two books. In Season 2 of the show, Conrad gets an email that his transfer application has been accepted, and he has a panic attack about the news. This informs more of Season 2’s plot and how he approaches his final exams at the end of the show.

In Season 3, the first episode opened on Conrad in California, and not only is he at Stanford now, but he goes to therapy. He also got into a competitive medical program for the summer, but Steven’s car crash and his nerves get him thrown out on the first day. This is an expansion from the third book, which introduced us to Agnes and Conrad’s point of view, which will factor into an episode in Season 3 that Christopher Briney will narrate. The third book has chapters narrated from Conrad’s POV as well.

Because he was a junior in the book when he proposed to Belly, Jeremiah didn’t have the added tension with his father over not taking the correct classes to graduate on time. The “super senior” element of his arc in the series is unique to the show, and it pairs in a way with a change for Belly that we will discuss below.

Steven’s car accident is completely new for the show. He does show up in book three, but not as prominently as in Season 3 of the series. He also doesn’t strike up a relationship with Taylor in the books, as mentioned above, so their storyline is unique this season.

In the latest episode of Season 3, Taylor decides to stay home and skip out on her New York summer internship to help her mom Lucinda straighten out her salon business financially. Taylor’s mom recently broke up with Scott, who apparently managed the money poorly, according to Steven, who Lucinda asked to look through the books.

In Episode 4, titled “Last Stand,” Steven told Taylor that Lucinda wouldn’t be able to get a small business loan because Scott took out lines of credit in Lucinda’s name.

In the books, Taylor had more of a crush on Jeremiah than Belly’s brother Steven, though the scene in Season 1 in which she kisses Steven was taken from the first book where it happened. Season 2, in which Steven is way more present than in book 2 when he is still home for the summer but working at Best Buy, sees him and Taylor expand on that kiss and get together.

This involves Taylor breaking up with her musician boyfriend Milo, who couldn’t be bothered to remember her middle name, as exposed at a party in Episode 6 of Season 2. Milo did not exist in the books.

In Episode 2 of Season 2, Belly has a flashback to a very romantic night in Cousins with Conrad. This took place while the pair was dating, though the didn’t really call it that explicitly. They drove out to the beach house because they wanted to see the beach in winter. After frolicking around on the snowy shores, they returned to the house where Belly made them “dusty” hot cocoa. This scene was taken almost word for word from the book, but the show hinted Belly and Conrad having sex, which was not suggested in Han’s second book. The memory is intercut with Belly’s first time seeing Conrad since they broke up at her junior prom, when she and Jere find him at the Cousins house.

The big catalyst of the plot in Season 2 is that Kyra Sedgwick’s Aunt Julia, half sister to the late Susannah, inherited the Cousins house and aimed to sell it. Conrad heard about a for sale sign in the front yard of the house from a friend, and that is why he disappeared from Brown randomly. He dropped everything to go there and stop the sale.

In the books, it was Adam Fisher (Tom Everett Scott) selling the house, not Aunt Julia. There was no Aunt Julia or Skye (Elsie Fisher) in book two.

In Season 2, Belly and Jeremiah start off on rocky terms because Jeremiah is still mad at Belly for choosing Conrad over him in the end of Season 1. This did happen in the books, but at a lesser level because they didn’t kiss when Belly was 16 in the books like what happened in the show. Jeremiah was Belly’s first kiss in the book when they were younger during a game of truth or dare. All this to say, Belly calls Jeremiah in the show while he called her in the books to tell her that Conrad was missing.

Laurel is not an author in the books, but this change for the show, which was established in Season 1, played a large role in Laurel’s storyline. Season 2 saw the release of her memoir It’s Not Summer Without You, both an nod to Jenny Han’s second book in the The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy as well as an ode to her dead best friend Susannah.

Conrad’s acting different the summer Belly is sixteen is a theme in both book and show, but in the book, Belly tries to get him to stop smoking cigarettes. The book also made a big deal of whether Conrad was doing drugs or not. In the show, Conrad smokes weed. He has also quit football, and his mom thinks he is sad about a breakup with a girl named Aubrey.

In the books, both boys seem to already know about the return of their mother’s breast cancer. In the show, Conrad knows because he read an email that she got about a drug trial. Jeremiah is in the dark most of Season 1, though he does start to put the signs of her fatigue, smoking weed and more together. He fully finds out at the Deb Ball, and the timing is not great because he takes his mom’s phone to look through her emails and leaves Belly stranded on the dance floor before the big number. Luckily, his brother, Conrad, who remembers all the steps, swoops in to save the day and romantically rescue partner-less Belly, set to Taylor Swift’s “The Way I Loved You (Taylor’s Version).”

Author Cleveland Castillo (Alfredo Narciso) is not in the books. He provides a rival of sorts to Laurel because she is an author in the show. The romance between them is also only in the show. Cleveland provides Conrad with a job in the show versus his busboy job in the books.

Cam (David Iacono), who becomes affectionately known as Cam Cameron by the fisher boys, is in the books, and he and Belly do strike up a relationship over the summer in Cousins in Season 1 of the show as well, but it unravels a bit differently. In the show, Belly more straightforwardly tells Cam that her heart isn’t as in the relationship as his is because she still has feelings for Conrad. In the book, she sort of lets the flame fizzle as Cam tries to keep in touch with her when she leaves Cousins.

The volleyball tournament in Episode 6 of Season 1 was also not in the books. Belly and her best friend Taylor Jewell (Rain Spencer) plan to participate as a team and win the whole thing for charity. Susannah oversees the tournament, but Taylor fakes an injury to try and get Belly to play with Jeremiah. She eventually asks him to sub out as well so that Conrad can help her win.

The first major difference for Season 1 of the show was the Debutante Ball storyline. This was not in Jenny Han’s first book of the trilogy. Susannah (Rachel Blanchard) “wrangled” Belly an invitation to the ball, which took place at the Cousins Beach Club, early on in the series, and it influenced several relationships and decisions leading up to the traditional event. At first, Belly’s mom Laurel (Jackie Chung) and her brother Steven as well as Conrad all doubted she would participate because they didn’t feel like it was her thing. She surprised them by saying yes. Season 1 culminates in the event as an emotional climax for many reasons, which we will get into later.

Many of the girls involved in the Deb Ball also play less major roles in the books, or they do not exist at all. Nicole, for instance, who Belly grudgingly calls Red Sox girl because she wears a Boston Red Sox hat, is white and blonde in the books. She has a bit of a thing with Conrad in the book and in the show, but she is portrayed by Black actress Summer Madison. Nicole is Belly’s big sister for the Deb Ball, but their friendship sours when Conrad texts Belly instead of Nicole, and Nicole and the other girls — Shayla (Minnie Mills), Dara (Kelsey Rose Healey), Gigi (Lilah Pate) and Marisa (Jocelyn Shelfo) leave Belly and Taylor without their clothes when they all went skinny dipping.