review: books... "The Summer I Turned Pretty" by Jenny Han

rating: 4 out of 5

rave: it's a good summer read. captures perfectly the essence of summer and fun under the sun.

bottom line: ehhhh.... i say.... read it.

synop: Belly's life revolves around the summers she spends in Cousins beach. The other 10 months of school is just a count-down until the next summer.

Every year every since the dawn of time, she spends her summers in the beach house with her mother's best friend whose children are her best friends too: Jeremiah and Conrad.

Belly has had a crush on Conrad ever since she was little, but will he ever see her as a girl, and not a playmate?

This summer, things will change. The boys will see her for who she is: not as her older brother's sister, but as a girl.

Rant: i think that this was a ehhh read... i'm really right down the middle: i mean, the beginning & middle were very well-writtten, but i did not like the end.

when i first read the synop, i thought that it would be another shallow teen romance, but i gotta say that it wasn't: there was depth to the novel.

and i think that what set it apart from those other books is that there is change in it:

Jeremiah's father is getting estranged from the family (divorce?),
the guys see her as a girl (!),
her brother is going off to college (!),
and she has a summer fling, which sort of got me mad b/c of how.... i don't know.

on top of that, Conrad was a total ass this summer: he would get drunk all the time, he stayed locked up in his room 99% of the vacation, he also had a summer fling with another girl (not that Belly didn't do the same thing, but hey...) i mean, it would have been fine if he didn't end up w. her.

thing is, i don't think that he deserved Belly's love.

even though he had a good reason to act like an ass, i still felt that it was unacceptable. Jeremiah was going through the same thing, and he wasn't an ass to Belly the entire summer. Maybe it was b/c of different personalities, ways of seeing the world, or watev, but i don't find that as a valid excuse.

Belly had pined her entire life for Conrad, and he was an ass that summer. a total ass. he alienated himself from the rest of the family, and he didn't deserve her.

especially since Jeremiah loves her. the cute younger brother who has always been there for her. but apparently, she doens't feel the same way.

maybe Han is trying to show that you fall in love with who you may, and he may not be perfect, but you're in love with him anyway, but i felt that Jeremiah deserved better than Belly's rejection for a guy that didn't show any interest and on top of that was out-right ignoring her.