"Belly capisce che quella è l'occasione per rimettere le cose a posto." Somewhere around hour three, that line hit me while I was sitting on a bench outside the clinic, Luna's head heavy on my knee, and I had to pause the audiobook because my throat closed up. Not because it was beautiful prose - it's not trying to be. Because I've watched seventeen-year-olds in my office make that exact same decision: the person I love is drowning, so I'm jumping in, even if nobody asked me to.
This is book two of Jenny Han's Summer trilogy, the Italian audiobook version narrated by Giada Bonanomi, and it shifts hard from the sun-soaked crush drama of the first book into something rawer. Susannah is dying. Conrad has basically shut down - classic avoidant coping, the kind I see in my kids who've learned that if you stop caring first, the loss can't destroy you. And Belly's stuck in that brutal space between wanting to fix everything and realizing she's eighteen and can't fix a damn thing.
When the Road Trip Becomes Therapy
The backbone of this book is Belly and Jeremiah driving to find Conrad, and Han structures it like alternating between past summers and the present winter search. In audio, this works better than I expected. Bonanomi's voice is bright - almost too bright for the grief content, but that tension actually mirrors Belly's refusal to fully sit in the pain. She keeps reaching for those golden summer memories even as the present is falling apart. At 1.25x speed, the pacing felt right for the road trip sections, though the flashback chapters sometimes blurred together because Bonanomi doesn't shift her vocal register much between timelines. I kept having to reorient - wait, are we in July two years ago or February right now?
The love triangle here is less about romance and more about two different trauma responses wearing boy-shaped masks. The romantic entanglement in Duke and I operates on a similarly transactional emotional logic, where the love interest is essentially a pressure valve for grief that has nowhere else to go. Conrad pulls away. Jeremiah performs okay-ness. And Belly - this character feels like one of my kids - she mistakes proximity for healing. She thinks if she can just get Conrad to the beach house, everything resets. That's not how grief works, and Han knows it, even if Belly doesn't yet.
Chosen Family in a Crumbling House
The beach house fight scene - where Conrad finally cracks and Belly and Jeremiah have to decide what they're actually willing to carry - landed hard for me. The chosen family energy is real here, but it's messy and conditional and full of resentment, which is honest. These kids didn't choose each other the way queer found families do, but they're bound by Susannah and Laurel's friendship, by summers that built a shared language. When that foundation shakes, nobody knows the right words anymore.
Bonanomi handles the emotional peaks fine. Her voice breaks in the right places during the hospital-adjacent scenes. But the quieter devastation - Conrad just... not showing up, not answering texts, existing as absence - that needed more weight in the silences. The production is clean, solo narration, no effects. Standard. For a 6.5-hour listen, it moves quick enough that you won't lose patience, but the Italian translation sometimes softens Han's already accessible prose into something a little too smooth. Some of the jagged teenage anger gets filed down.
Who Gets to Grieve Out Loud
What kept me thinking past the final chapter: Han writes Belly's grief as secondary. She's not the one losing a mother. She's watching someone she loves lose their mother, and the book takes seriously how disorienting that position is. You don't get a casserole. You don't get permission to fall apart. My clients would feel seen by this - the ones who carry other people's pain and forget they're allowed to hurt too.
The book's weakness is also its honesty: Conrad is pretty insufferable for long stretches, and while I understand the clinical why of his behavior, the audio experience of listening to someone repeatedly choose silence gets... tedious. Bonanomi can only do so much with a character who refuses to speak.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you've loved someone through grief they wouldn't let you share - listen to this. If you work with teens, or you were that teen, Belly's secondary grief will gut you in the best way. Skip it if you need resolution; this is a middle book that deepens the wound without offering any. Skip it too if a love interest choosing silence for chapters on end will frustrate more than move you.
Luna's Verdict (She Fell Asleep, But Gently)
This is a middle book that does middle-book things - it deepens the wound without offering resolution, sets up the finale, and trusts you to sit in discomfort. Representation done right for once when it comes to teenage grief: no tidy lessons, no wise adult swooping in, just kids trying to hold a house together because the house is all they have left. It's not the strongest entry in the trilogy, but it's the most emotionally honest one. And sometimes that's enough to make you cry on a bench while your dog pretends not to notice.
