Books like The Summer I Turned Pretty

Jenny Han's other beloved series starts with Lara Jean Song Covey's secret love letters accidentally getting mailed to every boy she has ever had a crush on. The fake-dating arrangement that follows with Peter Kavinsky is one of the most satisfying setups in YA romance.

Han brings the same warmth, family focus, and emotional honesty to Lara Jean's story that she does to Belly's. The Covey family dynamics are wonderful.

Lara Jean's relationship with her sisters and her father adds depth that makes the romance feel grounded in something real. If what you loved about The Summer I Turned Pretty was Han's voice, her ability to capture the way first love feels enormous and terrifying and wonderful all at once, this delivers more of exactly that.

Percy and Sam spent every summer together at a lake in Ontario. Their friendship turned into something more, then fell apart. Years later, Percy returns and they have to face what happened between them.

Carley Fortune alternates between past summers and the present, building the relationship chapter by chapter so you feel both the magic of falling in love and the weight of time lost. Like The Summer I Turned Pretty, this is a story where summer itself is a character. The lake, the heat, the sense that these few months are somehow more real than the rest of the year.

Fortune writes the sensory details of summer beautifully. Swimming at night, lying in the grass, the specific quality of August light. If you want The Summer I Turned Pretty's energy aged up into an adult romance, this is the book.

A family wedding on Martha's Vineyard, a girl processing grief, a slow-burn romance with the groom's stepbrother, and an elaborate game of assassin running through the entire event. K.L.

Walther nailed the specific atmosphere of a big family gathering in a beautiful setting. The wedding creates a contained world where emotions run high and everything feels significant. Like The Summer I Turned Pretty, this features family traditions, a coastal setting, and the bittersweet awareness that these gatherings will not last forever.

The romance develops naturally amid the chaos of wedding preparations and family drama. Walther writes the ache of missing someone you have lost while trying to be present for the people who are still here. It is a warm, emotional read with just enough lightness to keep it from becoming heavy.

Auden spends the summer before college with her dad in the beach town of Colby. She cannot sleep, and neither can Eli, a local boy carrying his own burden. They spend their nights checking things off a list of normal teenage experiences that Auden's overachieving childhood never allowed.

Sarah Dessen is the original queen of YA summer romance, and Along for the Ride might be her best work. The nighttime setting gives the story an intimate, dreamlike quality. Auden and Eli share a space outside of regular life where honesty comes easier.

Like The Summer I Turned Pretty, this is about a girl reinventing herself during one transformative summer. Dessen writes the small-town beach atmosphere with the same love and specificity that Han brings to Cousins Beach. Both stories understand that summer is when teenagers figure out who they actually are.

Samantha has spent years watching the chaotic, loving Garrett family from her bedroom window. When she finally meets Jase Garrett, the boy next door becomes the boy who changes everything during one pivotal summer. Huntley Fitzpatrick contrasts two families brilliantly. The Reeds are controlled, image-conscious, and emotionally cold.

The Garretts are loud, messy, and full of love. Samantha discovering what a real family looks like through Jase's eyes is the emotional heart of the book. Like The Summer I Turned Pretty, this explores family dynamics as deeply as it explores romance. The beach house versus the house next door.

Both settings become places where the protagonist sees a different version of life and wants it desperately. Fitzpatrick writes summer romance with genuine warmth and a political subplot that adds real stakes to what could be a simple love story.

Anna is shipped off to boarding school in Paris against her will and meets Etienne St. Clair, who is smart, funny, British-American, and has a girlfriend. Stephanie Perkins wrote one of the most swoony YA romances of all time by letting the tension build slowly across an entire school year.

Paris does for this book what summer does for The Summer I Turned Pretty. It creates a heightened reality where everything feels more romantic, more significant, more alive. Perkins writes the will-they-won't-they tension with expert timing.

Every near-miss and loaded conversation adds to the pressure until the resolution feels like a release. Both books understand that the anticipation is at least half the fun. If you read The Summer I Turned Pretty for the yearning, the waiting, the ache of wanting someone you cannot quite have, Anna and the French Kiss delivers that in abundance.

Vix and Caitlin come from completely different worlds but forge an intense friendship over years of summers spent together on Martha's Vineyard. From childhood through adulthood, their bond shapes who they become, even as jealousy, romance, and class differences complicate everything. Judy Blume wrote this as an adult novel, and it reads like The Summer I Turned Pretty grown up.

The summer setting carries the same weight. A place where the normal rules do not apply, where friendships feel more intense, where the person you become each June through August is somehow more authentic than the person you are the rest of the year. Both books capture how summer relationships shape identity in ways that persist long after the season ends.

Blume writes about female friendship with the same honesty Han brings to first love.