by Jenny Han
ages: 12+
First sentence: “We’d been driving for about seven thousand years.”

Belly lives for summers. Summers are when she is most alive, most at home, most in her element. Summers are when magic happens. Summers spent at the beach house, with her mother, older brother Steven, her mother’s best friend Susannah and her two boys, Conrad and Jeremiah. They are Belly’s world every summer.

She’s been the tag-along little sister for most of her life, but this summer, the summer she turns 16, it’s different. This summer, for the first time, people — boys — notice that she’s pretty. It’s also the summer that everything changes, because whether Belly likes it or not, nothing can ever stay the same.

Han has perfectly captured two things: 1) a hesitancy to grow up — Belly wants to be older, wants to be included with the boys, and yet she can’t quite seem to let the past, the way things were and have always been go quite yet; and 2) the need, desire, want of every girl to have at least one boy (preferably the boy they secretly adore) to acknowledge that they are pretty. Sure, there are other things going on here — divorce, angst, cancer — but really, the book all boils down to one girl, one summer, and her conflicting desires to change and yet stay the same.

It tugs at the heart strings, but not in a manipulative way. Perhaps, though, it’s a better nostalgia book for adults or older teens. One has to have gone through these emotions at some point in their life (and what girl doesn’t?) in order to truly “get” the book. Aside from that, though: it’s a beautiful portrait of a girl and the summer that changed everything for her.