Here’s How ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Show Ending Compares To The Books
The Summer I Turned Pretty has officially ended its third and final season, and it’s making a huge splash online already. The season offered a whole lot of drama (and gave us a new internet boyfriend to root for), but at its core, the show kept us hooked with one single question:
Who is Belly Conklin going to end up with?
In the show, Belly (played by Lola Tung) can’t seem to make up her mind between her first love, Conrad Fisher (Chris Briney), and her best friend, Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalengo). Not only are Conrad and Jeremiah brothers, but they’re also the sons of her mother’s best friend, upping the stakes between the characters—because at the end of the day, there isn’t just love on the line. There’s also family, friendship, and, of course, a beloved beach house.
Season three gave us perhaps the biggest conflict of the show thus far: as Belly prepares for her wedding to Jeremiah, she’s suddenly unable to to thinking about Conrad. However, the show takes a few sharp turns away from the books, and I’m here to tell you exactly how everything went down on paper—and how what we saw on screen changed the story.
In case it isn’t clear: There are major book and show spoilers up ahead.
Before I dive in, let me preface it by saying that author Jenny Han (who created and executively produced the show) said publicly that the ending of the show will be different, making fans speculate that Belly might end up with a different brother than in the books. And she was right, the ending was different—but not in the way some fans speculated.
Let me also say now that there are a lot of original plot lines in the show that I won’t be touching on, because they have nothing to do with the book—including Steven and Taylor as a couple (or just about any storyline about either of them) and Denise’s entire existence. Sorry! Don’t expect any updates there.
So, as we know, Belly and Jeremiah began the season by breaking up and then almost immediately getting engaged. While this gave viewers whiplash, it was also difficult for characters in the show, much like in the books. In both adaptations, Belly’s mother Laurel (played by Jackie Chung) opposes the marriage, believing that Belly and Jeremiah are too young to make such a serious decision. And just like in the show, this pushes book Belly to move out of her childhood home and into the beach house for the summer.
Belly And Conrad Reconnect In The Place That Brought Them Together: Cousins Beach
Just like in the show, Conrad isn’t over Belly—not even a little bit. He’s been pining over her for years but keeping his distance in respect for both Belly and Jeremiah, but the engagement shakes him up. When Belly moves into the house, he’s staying there for the summer during his school break—because unlike in the show, he’s a few years younger and is Pre-Med. In the books, there isn’t a job that he loses (the whole Steven car crash plot line isn’t even a thing), he’s just a kid with nowhere else to go. In fact, when Belly moves into the house, he tries to leave and stay with someone else so that he doesn’t have to be near her, only to soon return anyway.
Even though Belly is in charge of planning her wedding to Jeremiah, the forced proximity to her first love proves to be a challenge she didn’t anticipate—but unlike the show, we’re told this more specifically through Belly’s narration. In fact, during the famous peach scene (set when Conrad steps up to help an overwhelmed Belly), when Conrad wipes her mouth with his shirt, she calls it the most intimate thing anyone has ever done to her, proving just how much it shook her up.
Conrad Finds Out About Cabo
This actually stays pretty true to the book—at the bachelor party, Jeremiah’s frat brothers tell Conrad about Jeremiah’s infidelity. Sober but deeply distressed, Conrad approaches Belly about this information, believing that he’s spilling a secret—only to end up confused and disappointed when he finds out that Belly already knows and is planning to marry Jeremiah anyway. It’s then when he finally opens up and tells Belly that he’s still in love with her.
During this conversation, Belly does shoot him down harshly, but in her narration, she tells us that she only does so because she needs Conrad to let her go completely—because truthfully, deep down, she knows she still loves him. That night, she goes into Jeremiah’s room and tells him that she loves him.
The conversation between Belly and Conrad the next morning also follows the book closely. Conrad lies and says he was drunk and doesn’t remember what happened between them, but asks Belly to forget about it. This only infuriates Belly, who sees it as Conrad simply displaying his old behavior of going back and forth about how he feels about her, and she yells at him for playing with her emotions. Frustrated, Conrad finally admits that he does remember and that he meant every word, but that he’s trying to save face and make it easier for them to be around one another, especially since Belly is still planning to marry his brother—and since, Conrad finally admits, he never got over Belly and has loved her the whole time. He tells her he’s no longer going to pretend for her anymore.
Belly, rattled by this confession, goes for a swim that night and decides to be upfront with Jeremiah about what happened. He’s deeply upset and ends up leaving, even though it’s the night before the wedding, and by the morning of the wedding day, no one seems to know where he is.
The Will-They-Won’t-They Wedding Day
The wedding day in the show also plays out similarly to the book. While Belly prepares for the wedding ceremony, Conrad goes in search for his brother. When he finally finds him, a fight breaks out, but Conrad convinces Jeremiah to come back by pleading him to think about Belly. He also gives Jeremiah a letter that their mother wrote before her death, meant to be given to him on his wedding day. But when Jeremiah opens the letter, he realizes his mother has mixed up the notes—instead, he’s received Conrad’s letter, where his mother mentions only ever seeing him in love once (with Belly). Jeremiah agrees to return for the wedding, but tells Conrad to leave and to stay out of his life forever. That being said, Conrad does return to tell Belly that loving her was worth it to him, and that he’s leaving.
In the book, Jeremiah actually is willing to get married to Belly—but he grows frustrated and tense when she wants to talk about what happened, and even more so when she suggests they hold off on the wedding. Finally, he asks the question that’s on his mind: Does she still love Conrad? She admits she does, and that she thinks she always will, but that she loves Jeremiah too, and she’s choosing him. However, that’s not enough for Jeremiah, who doesn’t want Belly to use him to erase Conrad. The conversation in the show, however, goes a little deeper, pointing to Belly and Jeremiah’s codependent tendencies that developed after Susannah’s death, with Belly talking about how they navigated their grief together and how she no longer knew where she ended and where Jeremiah began.
Belly and Jeremiah breaking off the wedding is actually the last chapter in the book before the epilogue—this is where the original story truly ended.
Belly Chooses Herself—And Then She Chooses A Brother
The rest of Belly’s story is told through the epilogue (and through a few letters Conrad wrote her). Belly actually goes back to college after her break up with Jeremiah, moving in with her friends at college instead of the apartment she was going to share with Jeremiah. She never went to Paris, but she did spend her junior year studying abroad in Spain (remember, she’s slightly younger in the books). While in Spain, she starts receiving letters from Conrad, where he mentions her new hair cut (he saw it in a photo Laurel showed him) and sends her Junior Mint and the bag of Sour Patch Kids. He also mentions how Laurel told him she was dating a guy named Benito—but the relationship appears to have ended by his next letter. In the book, he also writes to Belly that he’s sad that she’s stayed in touch with Jeremiah but hasn’t written him back, though eventually, just like in the show, she does write him back—but around Christmas, when he writes to her to tell her that he’s been thinking about the Christmas they spent together at the beach house, and how it’s the best Christmas he ever had. She writes back to tell him that it was also her best Christmas, and that he should write back soon.
In the books, she doesn’t actually see Conrad again until her college graduation (roughly three years after her doomed wedding with Jeremiah), and it’s then that she realizes she’s still in love with him, and they begin dating again.
So no, we don’t get that Paris dinner scene with the insane chemistry. We don’t get the Seine-Taxi-Stairwell scene that destroyed the internet. And no, we don’t get the conversation about Conrad feelings for Belly and how it isn’t related to the trauma of losing his mom or Belly’s big confession on the train—in fact, we don’t really get any other big declarations of love at all. The rest of Conrad and Belly’s love story is mostly told in retrospect in the epilogue, which makes sense why Jenny Han felt she needed to “change the ending”—had we jumped straight from the doomed wedding with Jeremiah to an epilogue where she’s getting married to Conrad, it would have felt jarring and incomplete.
Does Belly Get Married By The End Of The Series?
Yes! The epilogue of the book actually begins on Belly’s wedding day, right after the ceremony and before the reception. She doesn’t immediately reveal the groom, but we do finally get to see what Susannah wrote to her in the letter—and it’s only when Belly says that Susannah was correct about her marrying a man with the last name Fisher that it becomes clear that she has just married Conrad, cementing the fact that they are infinite.
On the wedding day, she’s also shown waving at Jeremiah, who attended the wedding with a girl he’s dating, before running off to the beach with Conrad. Conrad picks her up and jumps into the water with her—a callback to the Belly flops from their childhood, a nod to the years they spent loving one another.
