It's Not Summer Without You

A Summer Story That Lets in the Dark

The first book in Jenny Han’s trilogy, The Summer I Turned Pretty, was a sun-warmed coming-of-age romance — all first crushes, beach houses, and the ache of being noticed for the first time. It’s Not Summer Without You is a different and, in important ways, a better book, because it lets grief into the idyll. The warm center of the series, Susannah — the mother of brothers Conrad and Jeremiah, and the woman who made the summer house at Cousins Beach feel like the safest place in the world — has died of cancer, and her absence reshapes everything. The sequel is about what happens to a charmed place and the people in it when the person who held them together is gone.

Belly Conklin, the narrator who spent the first book longing to be seen, returns older and sadder. The easy magic of the Cousins summers is over; the house itself feels haunted by loss. When the novel opens, Belly is adrift in her grief and her uncertainty about Conrad, the brooding older brother she has loved for most of her life. Then Jeremiah, the warmer, sunnier brother, calls with bad news: Conrad has gone missing, abandoning college and disappearing, and the two of them set off to find him. That search pulls Belly back into the orbit of both brothers and forces the unfinished business between the three of them — romantic and grief-stricken at once — into the open.

Beyond the Love Triangle

It would be easy to reduce this trilogy to its central love triangle, and the marketing certainly leans on it. But what It’s Not Summer Without You does well is use the triangle as a vehicle for something deeper than “which boy will she choose.” The choice between Conrad and Jeremiah is really a choice between two ways of grieving and two visions of the future, and Han ties the romance so tightly to the loss of Susannah that the relationships carry weight they would not otherwise have. Conrad’s withdrawal, Jeremiah’s determined cheerfulness masking his own pain, Belly’s confusion about what she actually wants rather than what she has always assumed she wanted — all of it is filtered through the fact that the woman who loved all three of them is gone.

Han also deepens her storytelling craft here. Where the first book stayed locked in Belly’s perspective, this one alternates between Belly and Jeremiah, and the shift pays off: seeing Belly from the outside, and getting inside Jeremiah’s longing and grief, gives the triangle dimensions it lacked. Belly herself is a more self-aware narrator than before, beginning the slow work of growing up — of understanding that she cannot just be the girl who is chosen, but has to figure out what she chooses.

The Pleasures and the Frustrations

The series’ great asset remains its setting and its mood. Cousins Beach, with its rituals and its summers stacked up like photographs, is rendered with a nostalgic specificity that makes the loss of Susannah land harder. Han is excellent at the texture of memory — the way a place can hold both your happiest moments and your deepest grief in the same rooms — and the book is steeped in that bittersweet doubleness. For readers (and now viewers, given the popular Prime Video adaptation) who fell for the world of the first book, this volume gives that world emotional depth.

It is not without the frustrations native to the genre and to the middle of a trilogy. Belly’s choices can still exasperate; she vacillates, misreads situations, and occasionally behaves with the maddening self-absorption of a teenager, which is realistic but not always pleasant to read. The love triangle, for all Han’s efforts to deepen it, sometimes spins in place, delaying resolution for the sake of the third book. And as a middle volume, It’s Not Summer Without You is structurally committed to leaving its biggest questions open — it deepens the situation more than it resolves it.

The Heart of the Trilogy

What this book establishes, finally, is that the Summer trilogy is about more than teenage romance. It is about a found family, a beloved house, and the way loss forces everyone to grow up whether they are ready or not. Susannah’s death is the gravitational event of the whole series, and It’s Not Summer Without You is where its weight is fully felt. The romance matters, but it matters because it is braided into grief, memory, and the painful business of becoming the person who has to make her own choices.

The Adaptation Effect

It is worth noting how the Prime Video adaptation has changed the way this middle book is read. The show, which Jenny Han herself helped shepherd, expanded and reordered much of the trilogy’s material, giving secondary characters more room and dramatizing events the novels handle briefly or in retrospect. For a generation of readers arriving at the books through the series, It’s Not Summer Without You reads differently than it did on release — its quieter, more interior handling of grief and indecision sits in contrast to television’s need for incident and confrontation. The novel’s strength, in that light, is its intimacy: it stays close inside Belly’s and Jeremiah’s heads in a way the screen cannot, and the loss of Susannah registers as a private weather rather than a plotted event. Readers who came for the romance often stay for that interiority, which is where Han’s prose does its quietest and best work.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A grief-shadowed, emotionally richer middle volume that lifts the Summer trilogy beyond a simple love triangle. Belly grows, the brothers come into sharper focus, and the loss at the story’s center gives the whole series real stakes. A strong bridge to the finale.

Read it after The Summer I Turned Pretty, then finish with We’ll Always Have Summer.