In this review, writer Jae-Ha Kim explores Prime Video's The Summer I Turned Pretty and the way it approaches its Asian American lead — and her love interests.

The Summer I Turned Pretty is a breezy series that tackles teenage summer romance (and lust) with vigor. It’s the latest adaptation of Jenny Han’s young adult novels, which include the To All the Boys trilogy. Though the plot is familiar, the lead actors are all incredibly attractive and likable, even when dealing with some of the less interesting aspects of this seven-episode Prime Video series.

When we first meet the show’s protagonist, Belly Conklin (newcomer Lola Tung) is not yet 16. Previously known as the hot girl’s bestie, Belly has – as her BFF Taylor (Rain Spencer) points out – become beautiful over the past year. What this actually means is that the teen finally grew breasts, lost her adolescent baby fat, and traded in glasses for contact lenses. That’s all it took for her to become one of the most sought-after girls at Cousins Beach, the summer vacation spot where her family has been visiting ever since she can remember. And it’s where her one-sided crush on Conrad Fisher (Christopher Briney) was born.

Unlike the Conklins who live a modest lifestyle, the Fishers are rich. They own a beautiful beach house and belong to the country club where Belly’s older brother Steven (Sean Kaufman) will work this summer. Susannah Fisher (Rachel Blanchard) is the effervescent blonde matriarch who’s harboring a devastating secret. She wants one last perfect summer with her family and friends before she faces the truth. Susannah and Laurel Park (Jackie Chung) – Belly’s novelist mother – have been best friends since college. And parallel to Belly’s relationship with Taylor, Laurel has an inferiority complex as the popular girl’s sensible friend.

It’s an interesting dynamic to showcase, because some Asian Americans will tell you that when we were growing up, we wished we were white – not because we actually wanted to be white, but because it seemed like our lives would be easier in terms of acceptance if we weren’t minorities who are regarded as perpetual foreigners. Chung plays Belly’s divorced mother as someone unaware of her own attractiveness, perhaps because she never experienced a summer where her prettiness was celebrated.

Race and ethnicity aren’t mentioned much, but there are a few touches that allude to the Asian half of Belly’s lineage. For instance, as is customary with Korean women, Laurel kept her maiden name when she married.

But one of the odd things I’ve noticed about the film and TV adaptations of Han’s books is that while a lot of effort went into finding the perfect Asian American actress to play the half Korean/half white female leads, none of their love interests are even kind of Asian. It’s especially odd when some of the beaus were written to be ethnically Asian. In the 2009 novel The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly describes Cam – who she briefly dates – as a good-looking boy who’s taller than her brother and the Fisher boys. “He looked like he was maybe half-white, half-Japanese, or Korean maybe,” she says. “He was so pretty I felt like I could draw his face, and I didn’t even know how to draw.”

The televised Cam is indeed tall and pretty as portrayed by David Iacono, an actor who’s of Italian and Puerto Rican ethnicity. Iacono does a wonderful job as a boy crushing on Belly, who is using him as a placeholder for the elusive Conrad. However, it just feels off that the showrunners – and Han, who is an executive producer on the series – whitewashed a minority character from the book. It harkens back to the criticism the TATB films received, where none of Lara Jean’s crushes were Asian boys (except for Edward Kim, who is briefly mentioned but never shown).

Perhaps to combat this criticism, Han’s TATB spinoff series XO, Kitty will focus on Lara Jean’s baby sister, Kitty, who moves to Seoul to pursue a relationship with a Korean boy she met during a family vacation in South Korea. It’s a cute concept if you don’t think too much about how Han’s storytelling seems to suggest that Asian American girls have to fly to Asian countries to find an Asian boy – as if the United States isn’t full of them. To be fair to the scriptwriters, they did create a more encompassing storyline for Belly’s older brother Steven, who doesn’t have much of a presence in the book. He even has an Asian American romantic interest (a debutante no less!), something foreign to Han’s female protagonists.

Speaking of Steven, Sean Kaufman is very charismatic in his role as a protective sibling who’s annoyed that his best friends are flirting with his sister. He also has the only storyline where race is addressed. At the country club, the rich white members assume he must be good at math because, you know, Asian. And he has to decide whether to address the racist microaggressions and lose his job, or hold in his anger and accept the high rollers' tips.

Han updated the series to make it more contemporary: the kids smoke marijuana instead of cigarettes (so do their moms!). And Conrad’s charming younger brother Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) is now bisexual and no one makes a big deal about it. Imagine if Kaufman – who is the personification of the character Han created in her book – had played Cam. Or if they had simply cast one more ethnically Asian male actor for that role. There’s room for more than one Asian boy — and minorities in general — at Cousins Beach in 2022. The only Black actor with any noticeable screen time is played by Summer Madison, whose Nicole is dating Conrad. In the book, the character is described as a blonde. While going against type to include a Black character is admirable, there’s also something a bit skeevy about having two teens of color competing for the attention of one white boy.

Despite having an Asian American female lead, a small nod to the LGBTQ community (besides Jeremiah’s storyline, one of the debutantes is escorted by another girl), and cool moms who don’t seem to care that their underage kids are drinking liquor and smoking pot … despite all that, The Summer I Turned Pretty has a dated feel. The debutante storyline is so out of place. No one needs to see Belly wearing a fascinator.

By the end of the seventh episode – and yes, the series has already been picked up for a second season – Belly will have had dalliances with both brothers. While I found Belly’s ricochetting between the Fishers to be rather gross, the ending was satisfying enough to give viewers a sense of anticipation for the stories yet to come.

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