Middle-of-a-trilogy books are the hardest to love, and this one knows it.
I started this during Sophie's nap on a Tuesday — she'd been fighting sleep for forty minutes and I was sitting on the hallway floor outside her door, AirPods in, willing her to just stop talking to her stuffed elephant. And honestly? Belly's emotional chaos matched my energy perfectly. We were both exhausted, both trying to hold things together, both a little dramatic about it.
When Your Summer Love Story Gets a Funeral
So here's the deal with Nu e vară în lipsa ta (that's It's Not Summer Without You for those of us who needed Google Translate the first time around): Belly's world has shifted. Susannah is sick again — really sick this time — and Conrad has basically shut down and disappeared. The beach house at Cousins that was all golden-hour nostalgia in book one? Now it's the place everyone's afraid to lose. Jenny Han does something gutsy here — she takes a series that started as this dreamy summer crush story and drops grief right in the middle of it. Belly goes from choosing between two brothers to searching for one who doesn't want to be found, and the whole tone changes.
What I appreciated is how Han bounces between present-day Belly and flashbacks to better summers. You get these warm, almost painful little memories — Belly and the boys at the beach, Susannah healthy and laughing — threaded between scenes where everything is falling apart. It's effective. It made me tear up in the pickup line at Emma's school, which is exactly what I said I didn't want. (Worth it though.)
The Belly-Jeremiah-Conrad triangle gets messier here, and honestly? I'm team "Belly, please just talk to someone who isn't one of these boys." But that's the point, right? She's sixteen. Sixteen-year-olds don't make clean emotional choices. Han captures that perfectly — the way Belly orbits between them, feeling guilty about one while thinking about the other. It's infuriating in the way that real teenage feelings are infuriating.
Cristina Tapoca and the Romanian Edition Experience
Okay, I need to be upfront — this is the Romanian audiobook narrated by Cristina Tapoca, and my Romanian is, um, nonexistent. I listened to the Amazon show in English first and then picked this up because I'm trying to expose the kids to more languages (that's my excuse and I'm sticking with it). Tapoca's narration is steady and clear even to my untrained ear — her pacing felt right for the emotional weight of the material, not rushed, not dragging. At just under seven hours, this is a perfect length. I finished it across three days of nap times and car time. High praise.
I can't evaluate accent work or character voice distinctions the way I would with an English narrator, so I'll be honest about that gap. What I can say is that the emotional beats landed — you don't need to understand every word to hear grief in someone's voice, and there were moments where Tapoca's delivery made me feel the heaviness even through the language barrier.
The Middle Child Problem
This book does what middle books do: it transitions. It's darker than Vara în care am devenit frumoasă, less self-contained, and it ends in a place that basically forces you to grab book three immediately. Which is fine if you have all three ready to go, but annoying if you don't. The pacing sags a little in the middle section — there's a stretch where Belly and Jeremiah are driving and talking and driving and talking that felt like it could've been tightened. But at under seven hours, even the slower parts don't overstay their welcome.
The real strength is the emotional honesty. Han doesn't pretend that a sick parent or a boy who won't return your calls can be fixed with a road trip. Things stay messy. Belly doesn't suddenly become wise. She's still impulsive and a little selfish and very much a teenager, and that's what makes it work. The refusal to tidy everything up reminds me of what Barbara Kingsolver does in Demon Copperhead — messy, impulsive protagonist who keeps making the wrong call, and somehow that's exactly why you can't stop listening.
Not groundbreaking, but sometimes you don't need groundbreaking. Sometimes you need a book that remembers what it felt like to be sixteen and terrified of losing someone, wrapped in a story short enough to finish before your toddler wakes up.
Who Gets the Car Time (And Who Should Skip)
If you watched the Amazon series and want the original story with more internal Belly monologue — this delivers. If you need your YA romances to stay light and breezy, buckle up, because this one has real sadness in it. The kind that sneaks up on you between the love triangle drama. Skip this if you haven't read book one — it won't land the same way without that foundation. Survived 47 pauses and still made sense, which for a book this emotionally heavy is saying something.
My book club will love this (if I ever have time for book club again).
