Belly Conklin is the kind of kid I'd want in my group sessions - messy, desperate to be seen, making questionable choices because she hasn't figured out that wanting someone to love you back isn't the same as loving yourself.
I was on a late evening walk with Luna through our neighborhood, the kind where the streetlights are just flickering on and the air still holds that last bit of warmth from the day. Luna was doing her usual thing - sniffing every single bush like she's conducting a full environmental audit - and I had Ana Elena Bittencourt's voice in my ears, narrating Belly's obsession with Conrad, and I just... stopped walking. Because I've heard this story before. Not in a book. In my office, from a sixteen-year-old who spent three years convinced that if she just became pretty enough, cool enough, different enough, the boy would finally notice her.
The Trauma Under the Sunscreen
Jenny Han does something sneaky here that I genuinely respect. On the surface, this is a beach house love triangle - Belly's been in love with Conrad since she was a little kid, but now Jeremiah's suddenly paying attention, and she's turning heads for the first time. Standard YA summer romance setup. But underneath? This is a book about a girl whose entire sense of self is built around how boys perceive her. Belly doesn't know who she is outside of wanting Conrad. That's not romantic. That's a coping mechanism.
And the thing is, Han doesn't sanitize it. Belly is annoying sometimes. She's petty with her friend Taylor, she's oblivious to Susannah's pain (there's something going on with Susannah that the book hints at with a heaviness that sits in your stomach), and she makes choices that made me want to reach through my headphones and say "mija, you deserve better than waiting for someone to decide you're worth their time." But that's exactly what being fifteen feels like. That raw, unfiltered desperation. My clients would feel seen by this.
Ana Elena's Belly - Younger Than You'd Expect
So here's where I have to be honest about the audio experience. I don't have a ton of data on Ana Elena Bittencourt's specific performance quirks, and I listened in the Brazilian Portuguese version, which already changes the texture of how these American beach-town dynamics land. What I can tell you is this: at 6 hours and 39 minutes, this is a quick listen. I did it in basically two walks and part of a bus commute. The pacing matches Belly's breathless narration style - everything feels urgent and immediate the way it does when you're young and every emotion is the biggest emotion you've ever had.
As a single-narrator performance, the weight falls entirely on Bittencourt to differentiate the characters, and with a cast that includes two love interests, a complicated mother, and Susannah - who needs to carry both warmth and something fragile underneath - that's a lot to hold. The intimate first-person narration works well for the format. Belly is basically talking directly to you, confessing everything, and audiobook is honestly the right medium for that kind of raw diary-entry energy.
Chosen Family in a Beach House
What got me - what really got me - is the Susannah and Laurel dynamic. Belly's mom and Conrad and Jeremiah's mom have this decades-long friendship that is the actual backbone of this entire story. The boys come and go, the crushes shift, but these two women chose each other as family and built a tradition around that choice. The beach house isn't just a setting. It's the physical space where chosen family happens every summer. And when you start to sense that something might threaten that space, that tradition - the chosen family vibes are immaculate but they're also fragile, and Han knows it.
This is where I put on my counselor hat: the healthiest relationship in this book isn't romantic at all. It's the relationship between these two mothers. And I think Han is quietly making the argument that Belly's obsession with Conrad is partly about wanting to permanently belong to this chosen family. She doesn't just want the boy. She wants the house, the summers, the belonging. That hit different.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you're looking for mature romance with clear-headed protagonists, skip this. Belly is fifteen and acts like it. If you need fast plot momentum, this is more of a slow simmer than a boil - the "action" is emotional, internal, and sometimes frustratingly circular the way crushes actually are. And if love triangles make you want to throw your phone, maybe sit this one out.
But if you remember what it felt like to be young and want something so badly it restructured your whole personality? If you want a story that's honest about the mess of growing up, even when the setting is golden-hour pretty? This one's real. Performative vs authentic - I know the difference. And Belly's mess is authentic.
Luna and I Will Be Back for Book Two
First volume of a trilogy, so yes - this is setup. Yes, there are threads left dangling (Susannah's situation, the Conrad question, who Belly actually becomes when she stops defining herself through boys). But the setup earned my trust. Han writes teenagers like they actually are, not like adults wish they were. That's rare. That's the thing that keeps me coming back.
Queer joy AND queer pain - both matter. And while this isn't a queer story, the emotional architecture is universal: wanting to belong, building identity through who loves you, and the slow terrifying work of figuring out that you have to love yourself first. That same ache runs through Little Thing Called Life, though the stakes there are messier and the self-reckoning takes decades instead of a summer. I've had that conversation a hundred times. Belly's just starting hers.
