We'll Always Have Summer

Romance

Print length: 304 pagesPenguin Books, Limited, 2025

Description

Belly has spent two years with Jeremiah, sharing both a relationship and a college life that once seemed to promise the future she wanted. After Jeremiah makes a serious mistake, however, the security of that future begins to fracture. Belly must decide whether the person beside her is still the one she can trust and whether her enduring feelings for Conrad mean she never truly left the past behind. What begins as a crisis between a couple expands into a reckoning with years of love, rivalry, memory, and expectation. The novel centers less on choosing between two brothers than on Belly’s struggle to distinguish commitment from nostalgia and forgiveness from denial as an urgent romantic decision forces all three to confront what growing up requires.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Dialogue-driven · Direct · Witty

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Reflective · Romantic · Tense · Wistful

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

Coming of ageFamilyIdentityLoveMarriageMemory

About Jenny Han

Jenny Han writes young-adult and children’s fiction, and her career also extends to screenwriting, production, and television. Her novels concentrate on the social and emotional negotiations of adolescence, especially where romance intersects with family loyalty, grief, jealousy, and changing expectations. She works in direct, conversational prose, often using brisk dialogue and comic embarrassment to bring private feelings into public view. Her plots tend to grow from simple devices or recurring settings, then accumulate complications as characters discover that affection does not settle questions of trust or commitment. In The Summer I Turned Pretty, annual visits to a shared beach house give the story a seasonal rhythm, while illness and shifting relationships disturb its familiar rituals. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before turns Lara Jean’s secret letters and a staged romance into a structure for exposing the gap between imagined and lived intimacy. Han later adapted the Summer trilogy for television, while the Lara Jean books became a film series.