The Summer I Turned Pretty

This series by Jenny Han follows Belly Conklin, a seemingly sweet teenage girl. She spends her summers vacationing at Cousins Beach with her family and another, including Conrad and Jeremiah. Belly finds herself caught in a love triangle between them like all the other iconic 2000s girlies. But just like Elena Gilbert, Belly turns out to be an incredibly annoying main character who you just can’t bring yourself to root for. She makes countless stupid decisions.

Her sad attempts to manifest a dreamy romance with Conrad burn multiple hearts. Belly is so caught up in her pining that she

Verity

forgets how to be a decent person. Only a handful of people can push themselves through the pain it takes to tolerate her. Poor little Belly. She made everything about her.

Whenever she’s forced to face the harsh reality that the world did not in fact revolve around her, she makes a pouty face. The book was a quick and easy read, perfect for a beach day. However, Belly will leave you feeling like you lost a couple of brain cells and all of your communication skills. (The TV series is GOATED though and Belly actually has a personality in it, so you should watch that instead!)

Unfortunately, we cannot have BookTok without Miss Colleen Hoover. Not only is she a problematic author who romanticizes abuse and makes coloring pages out of it, but her books are full of lost potential. The books in theory are nice, but the execution is quite head-scratching. This story specifically follows Lowen Ashleigh. She’s hired by Jeremy Crawford to be a ghost-writer after his wife Verity falls into a coma and can’t finish her book series. Lowen stays at the Crawfords’ mansion to study Verity’s writing style where she discovers a secret manuscript Verity wrote confessing all of her crimes.

The book certainly had a grasp on me, but it was a grasp of annoyance. The characters would use their common sense so sparingly. Lowen, if you know there is a murderer living upstairs, what money is worth staying in that house? Any sane person would leave and enter witness protection, not stay to seduce her husband. The entire book felt like a Riverdale episode if the writers put in a wee bit more effort. The only redeemable part of the book that made it three stars was the plot twist at the end. I’m not quite sure who gave CoHo pencil privileges, but I petition that these privileges be revoked! The book gave me a good chuckle at times, but Verity is the perfect example of how sometimes the TikTok algorithm utterly fails.