Best-selling young adult novelist Jenny Han has another series in the book-to-TV limelight. After finding success on Netflix with the three film adaptations of her To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series, she now has her first YA series The Summer I Turned Pretty getting the screen treatment with its recent premiere on Amazon Prime Video.
Not new to advocacy for having more Asian and Asian American stories represented in books, Jenny spoke about the issue on her press tour while a mention made an appearance on the new TV show.
On CBS Mornings this week, anchor Gayle King asked if Jenny was hurt when she wasn’t able to sell her early works featuring an Asian character. Jenny says her feelings weren’t hurt “because it was so matter-of-fact.”
To be able to sell her first YA novel, she made her main character Belly Conklin, played by Lola Tung onscreen, appear White.
“I had tried to sell a book with an Asian main character before this one, and people weren’t really interested in it,” says Jenny, who’s also the executive producer of the show. “The thing I would hear is we already have a book with an Asian. I thought with The Summer I Turned Pretty, it was a story I hoped would kind of have an effervescence to it that people can lock onto. After that, I wrote To All the Boys, and I was able to write my own ticket once I had garnered trust from an audience that might not pick up a book with a cover with someone who didn’t look like them.”
The character of Belly became half-Asian, half-White, and is now depicted as biracial on the updated media tie-in cover issued by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was the first best-seller to have an Asian girl on the cover, according to the author. The fight for representation even spilled onto the choice to have her headshot on the back cover.
“Even with my first book, it was important to me to put a picture on the back of it because at first they were like, ‘Hmm, we don’t really need it.’ It wasn’t really done at the time,” she says. “I want other young Asian women to see that and think it’s possible.”
The Summer I Turned Pretty follows Isabel “Belly” Conklin who’s on the verge of turning 16 when she heads off to Cousins Beach in Massachusetts with her mother and older brother for another summer with the Fishers, her mother’s best friend and two sons.
The foursome who grew up together every summer are now teenagers, and Belly feels the energy shift between her and the oldest Fisher son Conrad, played by Christopher Briney, and the younger Fisher son Jeremiah, played by Gavin Casalegno. Belly always had a crush on Conrad when she was considered too young and nerdy. Now that she’s blossoming into womanhood, heightened by a debutante ball, she becomes entangled in a love triangle that stretches beyond her and the two brothers.
In one scene in the fourth episode “Summer Heat,” after a conflict reaches a fever pitch in the Fisher summer home, Belly’s author mother, Laurel, played by Jackie Chung, heads to a bar to cool off. There, she sees the local author she’s been competing with in the beach town’s bookstore. Once they start chatting, the state of their careers comes up.
“When we went out with my first novel, everyone said, ‘Uhhh, there is no market for a book about a Filipino main character, and now it’s all they want from me,” says author Cleveland, played by Alfredo Narciso, about his treatment in the beginning of his fictional publishing career.
The show also stars Rachel Blanchard as Susannah Fisher, the mother of Conrad and Jeremiah. Rachel starred as the ’90s TV version of Cher Horowitz, the main character of Clueless loosely based on Jane Austen’s classic Emma.
The second season of the series has already received the green light for production.
