It's Not Summer Without You
Jenny Han, 2010
Romance Young adultContemporary fiction
A grief-stricken summer, two brothers, and a girl who can’t let go of the house that made her. A slow, sunlit ache of longing and grief, told in a tender first-person voice that lingers on memory and family.
Feels like longing, grief and nostalgia. About love, family and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy YA romance shaped by family ties, unresolved longing, and summers remembered with bittersweet clarity. It is a sequel and stays close to grief, so starting here may leave the relationships feeling already in motion.
Why read it
It gives you a clear-eyed look at how love and loss rearrange a family, with the kind of summer setting that makes memory feel physical.
A page from the book
Grief makes a person feel like a stranger to their own life.
I wasn’t in Cousins. Conrad and I weren’t together, and Susannah was dead. Nothing would ever be the same again. It had been—How many days had it been? How many days exactly?—two months since Susannah had died and I still couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t let myself believe it. When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really and truly gone? Jenny Han.The Summer I Turned Pretty became a Prime Video series in 2022; Jenny Han was a creator and executive producer on the adaptation.
Books that feel like this
More by Jenny Han
To All the Boys I've Loved Before
Jenny Han, 2014
A girl writes secret letters to every boy she's loved—then they get mailed. A warm, funny novel about sisters, first love, and the mess of being seen.
We'll Always Have Summer
Jenny Han, 2011
The last summer before adulthood, when first love stops being a season and starts asking for a life.
The Summer I Turned Pretty
Jenny Han, 2009
A girl returns to the beach house where she grew up and finds the boys she's known forever looking at her differently.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is It's Not Summer Without You for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy YA romance shaped by family ties, unresolved longing, and summers remembered with bittersweet clarity. It is a sequel and stays close to grief, so starting here may leave the relationships feeling already in motion.
- What is It's Not Summer Without You like?
- A slow, sunlit ache of longing and grief, told in a tender first-person voice that lingers on memory and family. Feels like longing, grief and nostalgia. About love, family and memory.
- What should I read after It's Not Summer Without You?
- If you liked It's Not Summer Without You, try One Italian Summer (Rebecca Serle), Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (Jamie Ford) and The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy).
A taste of the feed
Some kinds of care are a controlled descent, steered as gently as possible.
But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it’s how you spend your time on the way down that counts.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet · Jamie Ford
What a house becomes when no one has been living in it.
“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf strewn driveway.
The God of Small Things · Arundhati Roy
Time doesn't heal so much as hand you something to wear over the wound.
Maybe time didn’t heal wounds exactly, but it gave you a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A way to remember with a smile instead of a sob.
Night Road · Kristin Hannah
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