Jenny Han built her trilogy on a feeling most people recognize before they can name it: the summer house you return to every year, the boy who was always there, and the moment you realize nothing is going to stay the way it was. Readers looking for books like The Summer I Turned Pretty are rarely asking for another love triangle. They want the ache of a place that holds your whole history, and the grief of outgrowing it. The twelve below deliver that from both directions. Some are the YA summer reads that sit right beside Cousins Beach. Others are the grown-up version, the ones that pick the story up years later and ask what happens when the summer people come back as adults.
1. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
The Sinclairs spend every summer on their own private island off Massachusetts, in a family compound where the money is old and the rules are unspoken. Cadence returns after an accident she cannot remember, trying to piece together what happened during summer fifteen with her cousins and Gat, the boy she loves and is not supposed to. Lockhart writes in short, fractured sentences that make the island feel gorgeous and slightly wrong at once. If the Cousins Beach house felt like a character to you, this is the same idea taken somewhere darker, and the ending rearranges the book you thought you were reading.
Read this if: you want the privileged summer island setting with a twist that will flatten you.
2. The Love I Lost by Emilly Carter
This is what Cousins Beach looks like fifteen years on. Elena Reyes takes a restoration job at a crumbling Victorian inn on the Maine coast and finds Marcus Sullivan already there, the boy she fell for at nineteen and spent a decade believing had walked away without a word. He did not. Their breakup was engineered by someone they both trusted, a lie that cost them ten years neither of them chose to lose. Carter writes summer towns the way Han does, as places that keep every version of you at once, so walking into a room means walking into who you were the last time you stood in it. The difference is that Elena and Marcus know exactly what the lost years cost, and this time they say it out loud.
Read this if: you loved the coastal town and the first love, and you want the adult reckoning that comes after.
3. Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
The closest adult analogue to Han’s trilogy that exists. Persephone spends six summers at her family’s lake house in Barry’s Bay falling in love with the boy next door, Sam Florek, and then something happens that ends all of it. Twelve years later she drives back for a funeral and has to face him. Fortune alternates between the summers and the present the way Han cuts between years, and the lake town does the same work Cousins Beach does, holding a version of two people that no longer exists. It is warmer, sadder, and considerably more adult.
Read this if: you want the Cousins Beach structure written for readers in their thirties.
4. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han
Anyone searching for books like Jenny Han should start here. Lara Jean Covey writes love letters she never intends to send, and when they get mailed anyway she lands in a fake relationship with Peter Kavinsky that neither of them planned. It is lighter and far less devastating, but unmistakably the same author: the same warmth, the same attention to family, the same ability to make a small domestic moment carry enormous feeling.
Read this if: you want more Jenny Han with a softer landing.
5. Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson
Emily’s best friend Sloane vanishes before summer starts, leaving behind a list of thirteen things Emily would never do alone. Apple picking at night. Sleep under the stars. Kiss a stranger. Emily works the list, mostly with Frank Porter, and becomes someone who no longer needs Sloane to translate her to the world. Matson owns the summer-that-changes-you novel, and this has the same sunlit quality as Han’s beach chapters with a friendship at its center instead of a triangle.
Read this if: you want the transformative summer without the love triangle.
6. The First Time I Met You by Emilly Carter
If your favorite parts of the trilogy were the flashbacks, the summers before everything went wrong, this is an entire book of that. Carter goes back to Elena and Marcus at nineteen and lets their friendship tip into something else the way it actually happens, one conversation and one missed chance at a time. Because you already know how it ends for them, every good moment carries a weight it would not otherwise have, the same trick Han pulls writing Belly and Conrad as children. It makes the heartbreak in book one land twice as hard.
Read this if: you want the first-love summers before anything goes wrong, told in full.
7. Beach Read by Emily Henry
January Andrews inherits her late father’s beach house in a small Michigan lake town and finds her college rival, literary novelist Augustus Everett, living next door. They make a bet: she writes something bleak, he writes something happy, and they take each other on research trips to learn how. Henry writes grief and attraction in the same breath better than almost anyone, and the lakeside summer does what Cousins does, making a season the container for everything a person has been avoiding.
Read this if: you want a summer house, a boy next door, and dialogue that crackles.
8. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
One day in August 1983, ending with a party that burns a Malibu mansion to the ground. Nina Riva and her three siblings are the children of a famous singer who abandoned them, and Reid walks backward through how the family got here. The beach-town glamour, the surfing, the golden summer with rot underneath, all of it will feel familiar to anyone who understood that the Cousins house was never as perfect as Belly needed it to be. It is a family story before it is a love story, which is true of Han’s trilogy more often than people admit.
Read this if: you want the sun-drenched beach setting with a family unraveling underneath it.
9. The 10 Years We Were Apart by Emilly Carter
The finale, and the answer to the question Han’s ending leaves adult readers holding. Elena and Marcus reckon with what a decade of silence actually took, and Carter refuses to rush it. She lets both sit in their own guilt before she lets them trust each other again. For anyone who closed the trilogy wanting to know whether a first love survives being interrupted by real life, this is that book, and the proposal at the lighthouse, with a ring Marcus kept in a safety deposit box for ten years, is the payoff.
Read this if: you want the first-love story followed all the way to its adult ending.
The complete Love I Lost trilogy — available now
10. The Summer of Broken Rules by K.L. Walther
Meredith Fox goes to Martha’s Vineyard for her cousin’s wedding week, where the extended family plays a cutthroat game of Assassin every year. She has not really played since her sister Claire died. Walther writes the island, the boathouse, and the rituals of a family that has done the same thing every summer for decades, threading grief and first love through all of it without getting heavy. It is the closest thing here to Han’s exact tone.
Read this if: you want an island, a big family, and a game that turns into a romance.
11. Love & Other Words by Christina Lauren
Macy Sorensen and Elliot Petropoulos meet as kids in a closet full of books at her father’s weekend cabin in Healdsburg, and the novel alternates strictly between Then and Now, building toward whatever ended them eleven years ago. The Then chapters have the quality of Han’s summer flashbacks, two people becoming themselves in a place that belongs to them. The Now chapters are what happens when one walks into a restaurant a decade later. It is devastating in a way that sneaks up on you.
Read this if: you want strict then-and-now chapters and a reunion that has to earn itself.
12. The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen
Dessen is the writer Jenny Han grew up alongside, and this is her best. Macy spends the summer working a library job and being the composed girlfriend of a boy away on an academic program, until she falls in with a chaotic catering crew and Wes, who makes sculptures from scrap metal. Underneath it is her father’s death and everything she has not let herself feel. The summer job, the found family, the slow honest romance: this is the blueprint a lot of YA summer novels still work from.
Read this if: you want the classic that the entire summer YA genre is descended from.
What Makes Books Like The Summer I Turned Pretty So Addictive?
The trilogy works because of the house. Everything Han does emotionally is anchored to a place her characters return to on a fixed schedule, so every summer is a direct comparison to the last. Belly can measure how much she has changed, and how much Conrad has, because the porch and the pool stay the same while they do not. That is why coming of age romance books built on a seasonal setting hit harder than ones set across an ordinary school year. Time is visible.
The second thing is that Han lets her characters be genuinely young. Belly is petty, impatient and sometimes cruel, and the book never apologizes for her. Most books about first love smooth the edges off, and the result reads as nostalgia rather than memory. This one keeps the embarrassment in, which is why adults reread it. You are not told what being sixteen was like. You are made to sit in it.
It is also why so many readers hunting for books similar to The Summer I Turned Pretty end up disappointed by the standard lists. Those lists are almost entirely YA, and a large share of the trilogy’s audience found it as adults through the show. They do not want to be sixteen again for another four hundred pages. They want the feeling with grown-up stakes, where the separation lasted a decade instead of a school year and both people have to live with what they did. That is what the adult titles here do, and why a coastal second chance story like The Love I Lost belongs on the same shelf as the love triangle romance books that first pulled you in.
Frequently Asked Questions
What books are most similar to The Summer I Turned Pretty?
For the closest match in tone and setting, start with The Summer of Broken Rules by K.L. Walther and Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson. For the same author, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is the natural next read. For adults who want that structure with higher stakes, Every Summer After by Carley Fortune is the strongest pick here.
Are there adult books like The Summer I Turned Pretty?
Yes, and this is the gap most lists miss. Every Summer After, Love & Other Words, and Beach Read all use a summer setting and a years-later reunion. The Love I Lost trilogy by Emilly Carter does the same on the Maine coast, following a first love interrupted for ten years and then faced again in adulthood.
What should I read after finishing the Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy?
If you finished it wanting resolution rather than more longing, move to the adult titles. Books like The Summer I Turned Pretty that follow their characters into their thirties, such as Every Summer After or The 10 Years We Were Apart, settle the first love rather than leaving it open.
Is The Summer I Turned Pretty a love triangle?
Yes, and it is the spine of the series. Belly is caught between Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher across three books. Readers who came for that dynamic tend to like other love triangle romance books such as We Were Liars and Malibu Rising, which both put a romance inside a larger family story the way Han does.
Are these books about first love or about the setting?
Both, and that is the point. The best books about first love use a place to measure time, whether a beach house, a lake, or an old inn. The setting is what lets you feel the years pass. Every title here uses a returning location the way Cousins Beach works in Han’s trilogy.
You Might Also Love
- Books Like Emily Henry
- Maine Coast Romance Books
- Best Second Chance Romance Books
- Dual Timeline Romance Books
If the part of the trilogy that stayed with you was the coastal town and the boy who was always there, The Love I Lost picks that up ten years later and follows it all the way through. Start the trilogy here.
Emilly Carter is the author of The Love I Lost trilogy, available now.
