ALA Booklist (Wed Oct 30 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

After a brief but traumatic breakup, 20-year-old Jeremiah and 19-year-old Isabel decide to get married during a summer between college semesters. After all, they've known each other since childhood, when their families shared a beach house. Yet Isabel's first love was Jeremiah's older brother, Conrad, who had broken her heart three years earlier and disappeared to California. Does Conrad's return to the beach house signal greater commitment or disaster for the young couple? Han has crafted a beautiful love story complete with a happy, if perhaps unexpected, ending. Her characters, authentic and full of depth, mature both individually and together as the pages turn. Both the story's young adults and their parents find themselves tested as Isabel faces a classic choice between the nice, reliable good guy and his more exciting, seemingly less compassionate brother. With the added pressure of wedding plans that march inexorably forward, this is a compelling page-turner of a romance.

Kirkus Reviews (Wed Oct 30 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

Can teenage love ever be forever? Isabel (Belly) from The Summer I Turned Pretty (2009) and It's Not Summer Without You (2010) finishes up her freshman year at college somewhat unconvincingly committed to Jeremiah Fisher, one of the two brothers with whom she has spent summers since she was small. Isabel becomes furious to learn that Jeremiah had sex with another girl from their college in Cabo on spring break, but he wins back her affections with a grand gesture: a proposal of marriage. Caught up in the idea—she will plan a summer wedding! they will attend college as a married couple!—Isabel tries ignores her misgivings about Jeremiah, the appalled silence of her mother and her own still-strong feelings for Jeremiah's older brother, Conrad. It's both funny and believable when Jeremiah insists he wants to dance the wedding dance to "You Never Can Tell" from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Han gives a satisfying nod to wedding-planning fantasies even while revealing their flimsy basis for an actual marriage. A final chapter in 23-year-old Isabel's voice reveals the not-so-surprising happy ending. Han's impressive ear for and pitch-perfect reproduction of the interactions between not-quite-adult older teens make this an appealing conclusion to this trilogy romance among bright middle-class young people. (Fiction. 12 & up)

School Library Journal (Wed Oct 30 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

Gr 10 Up-In this conclusion to the trilogy, Isabel and Jeremiah are about to marry. Their families think they're too young and suspect that Belly is pregnant, an assumption that she, understandably, finds irksome. A virgin, she sees marriage as an act of defiance under the circumstances, and that's deep, for her. Readers know nothing of her personal ambitions (she's just finishing her freshman year at college) beyond teasing the affections out of Jeremiah and his older brother, both of whom are smitten with her. When Conrad shows up unexpectedly, Belly returns to the dilemma of the earlier books: Which one shall I choose, since both choose me? This is a bit cloying, as is the implication that the search for a life partner begins and ends next door. The Fishers and the Conklins raised their children together, Belly's the only girl (she has an older brother), and she has been looked after like a little sister by all three boys. As for the other characters, Taylor offers a sensible counterpoint to Belly as someone who questions her decision, but who winds up being just what she needs: a friend. Taylor makes her laugh, and offers comic relief as her wedding planner. The tension over whether or not this event is going to happen is well plotted. Both boys adore the protagonist, but in the end neither wants to fawn over her, which makes each a stand-up guy in his own rightand so much harder to choose between. While some might enjoy its fairy-tale essence of children turning into life mates, others might ask whether this series offers young women a path to independent adulthood beyond marrying Mr. Right. Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY