One summer can change everything, so imagine what can happen after 13 of them.
That’s how long readers had to wait to finally see Jenny Han‘s 2009 novel The Summer I Turned Pretty be adapted into a TV series. The coming-of-age drama, which centers on the love triangle between Belly (Lola Tung) and brothers Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno), who she’s grown up spending summers with in Cousins Beach, premiered June 17 on Amazon Prime Video and is now a contender at the 2022 TV Scoop Awards. (You can vote for your The Summer I Turned Pretty favorites here.)
In addition to writing the pilot episode, Han served as co-showrunner and got to make the major decisions about what would remain from the book—and what would be cut. Fortunately, she didn’t have to kill any of her darlings and that dreamy, wistful and magical aura of the source material fully translates to the screen, which was the author’s goal.
“I wanted it to feel like a locket that you find, you open it up and there’s this picture inside,” Han told E! News. “It’s a memory, but at the same time, I wanted it to feel resonant and current and raw.”