Teen dramas have been doling out romantic storylines for the parent characters long before the days when Dan Humphrey started dating his potential step-sister. The specificity of Laurel’s fantasy summer is ultimately what rescues The Summer I Turned Pretty from being too sticky sweet.
Sparks fly textual analyses of each others’ writing is exchanged the inevitable skinny dipping date is already in sight.
If you loved The Last Song, Han’s To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, or have the vaguest notion of what “coastal grandmother aesthetic” means, you’ll eat it all up with a spoon.įorget sophomoric text exchanges and just give me the scene in episode 2 where Laurel and Susannah are scoping out the local bookstore (because of course, Susannah is insisting on throwing her a book party-with catering!), and they run into a cute, Franzenesque author in horn-rimmed glasses. For Belly (played by Lola Tung), her older brother (a scene-stealing Sean Kaufman), and her mother, Laurel ( Jackie Chung), it’s family tradition to spend the season crashing with Laurel’s college bestie Susannah ( Rachel Blanchard), who owns a huge, hydrangea-bedecked house-and, critically, has two handsome sons who’ve always seen Belly as a kind of naive little sister, until now.Įnter the inevitable love triangle, but also every teen summer romance trope possible: the late-night swims, the date at the drive-in movie theater, the starched white summer job uniforms, the shopping spree, debutante festivities (a.k.a., excuses to show off the results of said shopping spree), beachside makeouts, open-air Jeeps, plenty of enemies-to-lovers energy, and an abundance of floppy-haired boys who wouldn’t look out of place in a TikTok creator house-all served up alongside the Taylor Swift Spotify Radio playlist. trilogy, follows 15-year-old Isabel “Belly” Conklin over her first post-pubescent summer at Cousins Beach, a fictional place that’s essentially the platonic ideal of a New England shore town.
The series, based on the first book in Jenny Han’s best-selling Y.A. Prime Video’s new series, The Summer I Turned Pretty, meets this seasonal all-ages tilt toward romanticism with all the satisfying ease of a shimmering open pool. The Summer Fantasy Industrial Complex is predicated on that yawning gap between what we think the months between June and August are supposed to be like-based on pop culture, our cooler friends’ Instagram Stories, cherry-picked childhood memories-and how the season actually unspools in our real, painfully un-soundtracked lives.
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