Every Year After, the television adaptation of Carley Fortune’s viral summer romance, Every Summer After, has finally debuted on Prime Video and as a fan of the book, there are some major changes that are hard to overlook.
Hot off the success of fellow romance adaptation Off Campus, and sharing striking similarities with The Summer I Turned Pretty (two brothers and shared summers by the water), the Every Year After adaptation finds itself somewhere in between the two. It’s not quite the hot and heavy romp of our new favourite ice hockey show, but also not as innocent as the teens of Cousins beach (season three stairwell scene excluded).
Straddling the line of telling a YA love story without skewing too young and appropriately dispersing a little spice is no easy feat. But, it’s something both the book and show do with careful consideration.
In an era where book adaptations are a hot commodity, avid readers have become accustomed to their sacred texts undergoing changes to better suit a narrative fit for the screen. That’s just showbiz, baby.
Whether you read the novel or not, here’s where Every Year After diverges from the book that started it all – other than the obvious title change.
Every Year After Book V Show Differences
What Did Percy Do?
For those who haven’t read the books, the mystery surrounding what horrible, dark thing Percy may have done to ruin her relationship with Sam hangs over the series like a mysterious dark cloud.
So what did Percy do? In both the show and the book, Percy, heartbroken over Sam, ends up sleeping with his brother, Charlie.
She immediately regrets the decision but lives with the guilt, keeping it a secret from Sam, for a decade.
In the book, when Percy confesses the truth of what happened to Sam, he reveals he already knew: Charlie told him years ago and he’s had all this time to come to terms with it.
In the show, however, both Percy and Charlie have kept the secret the entire time, leaving Sam to reel in the revelation and come to terms with it over a year, which we see in a flash forward at the close of the season.
Percy’s Job
In the book, Percy works as an editor at Shelter, a Canadian decor magazine.
In the show, she’s been reimagined as an obituary writer — a change that does a lot of heavy lifting. It gives her a concrete reason to return to Barry’s Bay, tasked with writing a tribute to Sam and Charlie’s late mother Sue, while also functioning as a symbol of her stalled ambitions.
Sue Leaves The Tavern To Percy
I’ll be honest, this one felt a little unbelievable to me in terms of understanding Sue’s logic, but I can see why the change was made. Who inherits the Tavern is never really addressed in the book, but in the show it becomes a central source of tension, with Sue leaving it to Percy rather than her sons.
The will reading results in Charlie and Sam both storming out, and gives Percy a concrete reason to stay in Barry’s Bay beyond her feelings for Sam.
Delilah & Charlie’s Affair
In the book, Delilah is primarily Percy’s childhood friend and occasional frenemy. The show gives her a full arc, including an extramarital affair with Charlie while she’s unhappily married.
She also becomes entangled in the Tavern storyline, having made a private agreement with Charlie to buy it before Sue’s will upended everything. It’s one of the show’s bigger departures, essentially creating a parallel love story that doesn’t exist on the page at all.
Jordie And Chantal’s Storylines
The book keeps its focus tightly on Percy and Sam, but the show expands the supporting players significantly — particularly Chantal, Jordie and Delilah. In the book, Chantal doesn’t go to Barry’s Bay with Percy; she’s a friend back home Percy is notoriously bad at keeping in touch with.
Then, there’s Jordie, possibly our favourite character in the show. Jordie is barely mentioned in the novel, he’s just a name in Sam’s friend circle. His expanded role came about largely because actor Joseph Chiu was so good in the audition that the writers built him out into a full character, and we’re grateful for it. The tension between his character and Delilah’s but also Chantal’s is possibly the most exciting deviation from the book we’ve seen in the show.
The Engagement Ring
Book readers who clock the engagement ring in Sam’s bedroom will assume it’s connected to a past proposal to Percy — but in the show that proposal never happened. The ring is for his current girlfriend Taylor, and Sam gets as far as almost proposing before Percy’s return to Barry’s Bay changes everything
Every Year After Show V Book Ending
The book ends a year after Sue’s death with Percy and Sam long reconciled, living together in Toronto and planning a future — Percy even intends to propose. The show pulls back well before that point, closing on the two of them looking at each other hopefully after months apart, with nothing resolved — leaving plenty of the source material intact for a potential second season.
Charlie’s Heart Problems
Speaking of a second season, the show closes on Charlie having what appears to be a medical episode after finding a photograph of himself, Percy and Sam as teenagers on the lake. The photo was taken by photographer Alice Everly — who, in Carley Fortune’s 2025 sequel One Golden Summer, becomes Charlie’s main love interest.
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