Belly Conklin, an Unreliable Narrator
Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty pastel-shaded beach trilogy has been greatly acclaimed recently, but beneath the waves, there’s something richer going on. Isabel “Belly” Conklin may tell us everything, but that doesn’t mean we should believe her every word. In fact, the series (both the books and their Prime adaptation) thrives on the tension between what Belly says and what we, as readers or viewers, suspect is really happening.
Unreliable narrators aren’t new, of course. Literature is full of them: Holden Caulfield sulking through New York, Nick Carraway insisting he’s honest while sipping Gatsby’s champagne. Belly joins that lineage, though in a much more sunscreen-scented way. From the very beginning, her narration is steeped in subjectivity. She tells us she’s been overlooked all her life, that suddenly this summer she’s “different,” that everything has shifted because people are finally paying attention to her. But the more she insists on this transformation, the more we begin to question how much of it is real and how much of it is the drama-soaked lens of a teenager desperate to be seen.
Take, for example, her view of Conrad. Belly positions him as the brooding, unreadable centre of her universe. Every sigh, every half-smile, every cigarette seems to her like a divine omen. Yet from the outside, he looks less like Heathcliff and more like a moody boy who needs therapy and an iron supplement. Belly’s narration turns him into a tragic hero, when the reality is that we’re often seeing nothing more than her infatuation blurring the frame. This perception, too, of the person he is changes drastically for Belly in Season 2. Belly puts across two completely different Conrad Fisher personalities (rather, the interpretations) in the two seasons. She isn’t lying to us maliciously; she’s just narrating as any sixteen-year-old would, which is to say: unreliably.
Even her relationship with Jeremiah is warped by this filter. Belly tells us she loves him, that he makes her feel safe and wanted, but we always sense the ghost of Conrad in the room, a shadow Belly can’t admit is controlling her heart. This unsaid setting is conveyed amazingly by Jenny. This is the hallmark of an unreliable narrator: the gap between what is told and what we feel to be true.
The adaptation on Prime leans into this unreliability in smart ways. We’re not locked solely in Belly’s head like the books anymore, which means we catch glimpses of perspectives Belly’s narration would otherwise edit out. The soundtrack swells to her emotions, but the camera sometimes lingers on contradictions: Conrad’s face softening when she’s not looking, Laurel’s exhaustion visible while Belly’s voiceover glosses over it, even Belly’s eyes following Conrad despite her having ‘evicted’ him from her heart. If the book relies on Belly’s subjectivity, the show balances it with dramatic irony, letting us watch her misinterpret events in real time.
Why does this matter? Because The Summer I Turned Pretty isn’t just a love triangle. It’s a story about how adolescence warps perception. Belly is unreliable, not because she’s scheming, but because she’s human. Her summers at Cousins are tangled with memory, longing, and self-pity. She frames herself as the heroine of a romance, even when reality is far messier.
In the end, Belly’s unreliability isn’t a flaw of Jenny Han’s writing; it’s the point. We aren’t supposed to take her word as gospel. We’re supposed to read between the lines, to watch the sunscreen-smudged illusion of summer innocence fade and notice what Belly can’t yet articulate. Like all good unreliable narrators, she forces us to do the work, to question, to doubt, to empathise anyway. And perhaps that’s why we keep coming back to Cousins Beach: not for the love triangle alone, but to watch Belly learn slowly and painfully that the stories we tell about ourselves are never the whole truth.