Summer I Turned Pretty season 3 shifts timeline and deepens drama with major plot changes

Season 3 of The Summer I Turned Pretty introduces a four-year time jump and new twists not in book.

The third and final season of The Summer I Turned Pretty has premiered on Prime Video, bringing a four-year time jump and significant deviations from Jenny Han’s third novel, We’ll Always Have Summer. The beloved coming-of-age series continues to follow Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) as she navigates a complicated love triangle with brothers Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno).

This season opens with Belly in her junior year at Finch College, joined by her best friend Taylor (Rain Spencer) and longtime boyfriend Jeremiah. The show extends the novel’s original two-year jump into a four-year leap, creating more space for believable relationship dynamics and adult character development. Jeremiah, still reeling from college party culture, discovers he's graduating late due to missed course updates. Belly, meanwhile, finds a new calling in sports psychology after a career-ending volleyball injury. Her brother Steven (Sean Kaufman), having graduated early from Princeton, now works at a tech start-up with Adam Fisher (Tom Everett Scott).

Beyond academics and careers, the series introduces entirely new subplots—most notably, Steven’s unexpected car accident. After rekindling a secret romance with Taylor, Steven gets into a heated argument with her and is T-boned by another vehicle. He falls into a medically induced coma but survives, using the incident as a wake-up call to rethink his priorities. He ends things with Taylor, unaware she was about to propose giving their relationship another try.

Jeremiah’s character arc also takes a dramatic turn. Unlike the novel, which included a single act of infidelity, the series reveals that he cheated on Belly twice. Despite this, Jeremiah proposes to her shortly after, and Belly surprisingly agrees—raising questions about whether their relationship can survive.

With creator Jenny Han hinting that the finale may diverge from the book’s ending, fans are left wondering not only who Belly ends up with—but how far the show is willing to rewrite its source material.