Summary
Chapters 1 through 9 detail Belly, Steven, and Laurel’s arrival at Susannah Fisher’s Cousins Beach summer home. On the car ride there, Steven and Laurel tease Belly about her longstanding crush on Conrad, Susannah’s older son. Laurel mentions that there may also have been some romantic connection between Belly and the younger Fisher boy, Jeremiah.
Then, through Belly’s first-person narration, readers learn about the past moments leading up to the present one. Some of the notable points brought up include: the fact that Laurel and Belly’s father are divorced, that Laurel and Susannah were childhood best friends, and that Laurel has been bringing her children to Cousins Beach for many summers to stay at Susannah’s beach house.
When the trio arrives at the beach house, Belly notices Susannah’s boys noticing her in a way that they didn’t in past summers: she feels Conrad scan her from head to toe, and Jeremiah tells her how different she looks.
The two brothers and Steven then proceed to throw her into the pool, a tradition of making Belly “belly flop” that has continued through the summers. However, even in the continuation of summer tradition, she notes how subtle differences now tint her interactions with Susannah’s boys.
Eventually, Susannah herself comes down to greet her, and the older woman proclaims that this would be a summer that Belly would “never forget.” Belly secretly agrees, noting that this was “the summer [she] turned pretty.”
Interspersed in the narrative of the present are a few flashback chapters that detail Belly’s pre-teen summers, over which she developed a burning and longstanding crush on the older Conrad. However, she notes that she always felt that the boys excluded her and saw her as Steven’s “little sister” rather than a “real girl.”
This summer, she feels that Conrad pays attention to her in a way he never did before. The two share a conversation about Conrad’s recent breakup with ex-girlfriend Aubrey, and later that evening, when Belly goes for a solitary swim at night, Conrad comes out to sit by the pool. Conrad smokes a cigarette and drinks beer as he does so. Belly notes that he never used to smoke before and feels that the air is “charged” in that interaction.
Analysis
Chapters 1-9 give the contextual information necessary to understanding the novel’s plot, and suggest how this particular summer will be different from all the previous ones. Jenny Han sets up the novel’s context by zooming into the past to create a narrative arc of Belly’s previous interactions with Susannah’s boys.
This narrative is primarily one of feeling excluded. In Chapter 6, for example, Belly recounts that at age ten, she felt that “the boys were a unit…everyone had someone but [her]. [She] wished [she] was at home, making butterscotch sundaes with [her] dad.” Various other instances of reflection by Belly emphasize her feelings of not belonging.
Having used flashbacks to create a narrative of how Belly used to feel around Conrad, Jenny Han uses tone and foreshadowing to illustrate just how different this summer will be from past summers.
As Belly pulls up to the Fisher summer home with her family, a tone of excited anticipation underlies Belly’s thoughts, even as she bickers with Steven: “I loved this drive…It was like coming home after you’d been gone a long, long time. It held a million promises of summer and of what just might be.” These images of “coming home” and of “millions” of things that “might be” set up a mood particularly charged with possibility: this summer is one where, unlike others, anything might happen.
In addition to tone, Han uses prophetic comparisons to foretell what is to come: a salient instance is the one mentioned above, in which Susannah announces that Belly won’t forget this particular summer. Han makes the foreshadowing even clearer by then explaining that “Susannah always spoke in absolutes…and when she did, it sounded like a proclamation, like it would come true because she said so. The thing is, Susannah was right. It was a summer I’d never forget. It was the summer everything began.“ So, like a prophetess, Susannah Fisher announces that something memorable will soon happen.
