The Summer I Turned Pretty has officially entered uncharted waters, and fans are anxious.
Amazon Prime Video’s three-season romance drama is an adaptation of Jenny Han’s best-selling young adult trilogy and follows Isabel “Belly” (Lola Tung) through the years as she’s caught in a love triangle with brothers Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno).
*Warning: this article contains major spoilers from The Summer I Turned Pretty’s season three, episode eight*
At the end of Wednesday’s episode, high school sweethearts Belly and Jeremiah call off their wedding after he confronts her about her unresolved feelings for Conrad.
Belly is then seen packing up her things and heading to the airport to study abroad in Paris — an opportunity she had originally given up to stay with Jeremiah. However, just as she’s about to board the plane in the final scene, she notices Conrad sitting at a separate gate. The episode ends on a cliffhanger, with viewers left wondering if Belly will approach Conrad or not.
Up until now, the show has mostly followed the books with only minor deviations. But as many readers have pointed out, the airport scene marks a major change, as Conrad was never at the airport in the original source material.
Instead, the final chapter of the third book, We’ll Always Have Summer, ends with Jeremiah and Belly calling off the wedding. Then, in the epilogue, which jumps forward two years, readers learn that while studying abroad, Belly and Conrad reconcile through letters. They later reconnect at Belly’s college graduation and end up getting married.
With three episodes still left in the series — and the storyline heavily deviating from the books — fans remain cautiously optimistic about how the show will wrap up.
“We’re now in uncharted territory for the next three weeks,” one viewer wrote on X.
“Just finished ep 8 of tsitp and it’s best episode of the season so farrr ahhhhhhhh!!! it’s the end of the book too so next three episodes are all up to jenny han,” a second eagerly added. “I cant wait.”
“tsitp is reaching non book material,” a third noted, while a fourth quipped: “We should all be very scared.”
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“We’ve [gone] exactly one scene outside the book canon timeline and it’s already buzzf***ingcentral jenny han i never doubted you,” a fifth commented.
“Mind you the book has like 4 pages after this episode…. and we still have 3 more episodes…. i’m shaking,” another said.
Speaking last month to Elite Daily, Han, who also created the series, teased that readers shouldn’t assume that the show will end exactly as the books did.
“I always knew how I wanted to end the books. But with the show, I went into it with an open mind. I wanted to approach it with fresh eyes and just see what sort of magic happened on screen,” she admitted.
“I am somebody who is always changing things up. People will be like, ‘Why are you changing that? That was working well!’ But to me, it could always be better. That’s how I approach everything, so naturally I was going into this story feeling like I wanted to make it even better and try new things.”
