‘Every Year After’ vs. ‘Every Summer After’: What Prime Video Changed From the Book and Whether It Works
When a beloved BookTok novel makes the leap to streaming, it arrives carrying the weight of a devoted readership that has already imagined every scene, every kiss, and every heartbreak in vivid detail.
Carley Fortune’s debut novel ‘Every Summer After’ built that kind of fandom, spending weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and accumulating well over a million copies sold after the online reading community latched onto it with genuine passion. Prime Video’s adaptation, retitled ‘Every Year After’, drops all eight episodes today, and book fans and newcomers alike are heading in with very different expectations.
The series is based on Fortune’s bestselling novel, which spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold over one million copies, with the book hashtag accumulating enormous reach across social media. Fortune herself serves as an executive producer on the adaptation. The romance centers on Percy Fraser and Sam Florek, childhood friends whose summer love story is told across six years and one complicated week when they are forced to confront their shared past.
The title change alone signals that this is an adaptation willing to make its own decisions. The shift from ‘Every Summer After’ to ‘Every Year After’ was a deliberate creative choice, expanding the scope of the story beyond summer to explore who Percy and Sam are during the off-season and in the city, giving the show room to breathe in ways the book’s seasonal structure did not allow.
What the Show Keeps, and What It Changes
Author Carley Fortune, speaking exclusively to E! News, described her feelings about the adaptation changes as entirely positive: “This is a different medium that we’re telling this story. There’s not a change where I’m like, ‘I don’t like that change.’ It all makes so much sense to me.” However, there was one element she insisted on preserving. “It was so important to me that Barry’s Bay was set in Canada,” she said. “It’s a real character in the book. Cottaging is such a Canadian experience, and it was just really important to me.”
Beyond the geography, some character specifics have shifted in the translation. In the source novel, Percy is living in Toronto working as a senior editor at an interior design magazine, whereas the show makes adjustments to her career and circumstances. The dual timeline structure, however, remains central to both versions. The show flashes back across Percy and Sam’s years at Barry’s Bay, weaving together memories of bonfires, horror-movie nights, stolen kisses, and time spent at Sue’s restaurant The Tavern, alongside the painful present-day reunion triggered by a death in the family.
The reviews landing today are genuinely split, in a way that reflects exactly the tension that always exists when a beloved book meets screen adaptation. On the positive end, Variety found that the series carves out its own identity despite inevitable comparisons, praising the shimmering chemistry between Sadie Soverall and Matt Cornett and a soundtrack featuring Lana Del Rey and Dolly Parton. One critic noted that “Percy really is the emotional heartbeat of the series, and Soverall never misses a beat,” describing her performance as consistently natural and deeply felt, with the audience always able to sense exactly what the character is experiencing.
Screen Rant noted that Soverall particularly shines in the past timeline, when Percy is at her most ambitious, while pointing out that the show’s dual timeline structure can initially make it harder to connect with the leads. More critical voices have pushed back harder. The Wrap described the show as “decidedly uninspired,” citing muddled timelines that make it difficult to distinguish between the show’s past and present versions of its characters, and suggesting that the story, while lovely in setting, is ultimately rote and predictable across its eight episodes.
The comparisons to ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ are unavoidable and Prime Video clearly does not mind them. ‘Every Year After’ has been described as sharing significant DNA with that earlier hit, following a young woman returning to a waterfront town where she is thrown back into a complicated love triangle with two brothers after their mother’s death. The streamer has built an entire lane around this kind of sun-drenched, emotionally loaded YA romance, and ‘Every Year After’ is very much arriving as the summer’s next entry in that tradition.
Fortune herself said of the casting when it was announced: “I couldn’t be more excited about this fabulous cast. This is an enormously talented group of actors, whose auditions made me laugh, swoon, and cry. I know they’ll have fans of ‘Every Summer After’ falling in love with their favorite characters all over again.”
Whether the show converts non-readers or simply rewards the fans already in love with Percy and Sam is the central question this week. All eight episodes are available now, so the binge is entirely up to you.
Let us know in the comments what you thought of ‘Every Year After’ and how it stacks up against the book for those of you who have read ‘Every Summer After’.
