51 pages • 1 hour read
Tessa BaileyIt Happened One Summer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Piper Bellinger is astonished and alarmed when her boyfriend, Adrian, breaks up with her at a rooftop party in Los Angeles. They’ve dated for three weeks—Piper’s longest relationship. At 28, Piper’s only career is “partying” and “being seen” (3). After the breakup, Piper is concerned that she’s aging and becoming irrelevant, nothing but “a pretty girl with a millionaire stepfather” (4).
Knowing everyone on the rooftop is watching her breakup, Piper tries to prove that she is fun and carefree by breaking into the rooftop pool at the Mondrian Hotel. She calls her best friend, Kirby—who already knows about the breakup from posts on social media—and as Piper takes a hired car to the Mondrian, she tells Kirby to invite everyone they know to join them.
Chapter 2 Summary
Piper is in jail. Kirby identified her to the police as the person behind the break-in at the hotel, and Piper was arrested. When the guard asks why she created such havoc, Piper acknowledges that her boyfriend broke up with her and reflects that she “just wanted to be seen. Acknowledged. Celebrated instead of…disregarded” (11).
After chatting with the guard about her unflattering uniform, Piper persuades the woman to let her use the private bathroom. As she regards her smudged reflection, Piper doesn’t feel proud to have reaffirmed her reputation as a party queen. Her sister Hannah comes to bail her out, and as they exit the station, photographers ask questions about Piper’s escapade. She checks social media and sees that a picture of her from the party has a million likes, but she wonders if all she is to them is a “two-dimensional image” (17), just as she was to Adrian.
Chapter 3 Summary
Piper endures a lecture from her stepfather, Daniel, about her behavior. Daniel is angry that Piper does nothing but party and spend money, and he accuses her of lacking ambition or purpose. Daniel is a filmmaker, and the owner of the Mondrian Hotel is investing money in his next film. He demands that Piper be held accountable for damaging the property.
Daniel informs Piper and Hannah that their deceased father, Henry Cross, who was a fisherman in Westport, Washington, owned a small bar there. Piper was four when Henry died on the Bering Sea fishing for king crab. She has vague memories that he smelled of salt water and had a “boisterous laugh” (24). When their mother, Maureen, moved to Los Angeles with her girls and met and married Daniel, no one ever spoke of Henry.
Daniel decides to send Piper to Westport for three months to manage the bar, saying it will do her good to fend for herself. Piper is appalled at the idea; “[o]ut there,” she thinks, “her ineptitude, her uselessness, would be glaring” (26). Her mother warns Piper that the men of Westport aren’t what she’s used to; they are unpolished, direct, and capable. Hannah decides to go with Piper to help.
Chapter 4 Summary
Brendan Taggart is sitting in the bar the locals call No Name while his friend Randy tells a well-worn story about the time he was swept overboard and lost a prize crab. Brendan’s attention is caught by a pair of women who arrive in a taxi and begin unloading suitcases. He notes that the woman in the floppy hat “could have stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine” (32), which makes her out of place in Westport. When the women come inside and announce that they own the bar, Brendan is annoyed. No Name belongs to the locals, the narrator says, and “these out-of-towners walking in and claiming ownership didn’t sit right at all” (35). Brendan is wary of Piper but, when he learns the women are staying above the bar, he picks up a suitcase and offers to show them their room.
Chapter 5 Summary
As Piper follows the tall fisherman, she reflects that he is very well-built, but she shuts down her flirtatious attitude the moment she notices he is wearing a wedding ring. She wants to be friendly, but her living quarters dismay her. The single-room apartment is small, rundown, and infested by mice. There are no locks on the doors. There’s a bunk bed.
Piper sees Brendan’s “unwavering gaze […] on her, waiting for her to crack” (42). And she decides she won’t. She believes that he’s dismissing her just as her ex-boyfriend and stepfather did. She tries to keep her spirits up, but when Brendan tells her that her LA talk doesn’t belong here, Piper answers that she doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere. She regrets this confession and, when Brendan asks if she’s there to film a reality show, she slams the door in his face.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
These chapters establish the initial conflict and set up the circumstances that lead Piper to Westport. They also introduce the two romantic leads, the hero and heroine. The opening paragraphs focus on Piper’s concern about her appearance, especially how she looks on social media. When Adrian breaks up with her, Piper at first thinks the flaw must be in her appearance, but she is dismayed when he hints that she’s just not interesting. Adrian confirms that she is fun and attractive but says there is nothing more to her. This accusation causes Piper to question her identity: Who is she, really?
Her appreciation for Adrian’s suit and her hiring a luxury car to take her across town show Piper’s love of expensive things, and her spur-of-the-moment decision to throw a party shows that she doesn’t think things through. Her conversation with the guard at the police station about her uniform further illustrates Piper’s focus on appearance, but it also shows that Piper can converse easily with and relate to people. The guard calls her “princess,” “sweetheart,” and “beauty queen,” while Adrian called her a “smoke show,” indicating that people evaluate Piper by her appearance but don’t think there’s much underneath.
The scene at home with her stepfather and Hannah shows that Daniel doesn’t think highly of Piper’s capabilities, either. Her hotel break-in is the inciting incident that sets the plot in motion, while Piper’s dead father introduces the subplot that will involve a journey of self-discovery as Piper eventually connects with Westport. Her sister Hannah seems to be Piper’s closest and most substantial friend. Hannah defends Piper to their father and shows a loyalty that suggests there are deeper qualities to Piper than the superficial prettiness that others see.
In contrast, Piper’s relationship with her mother, Maureen, seems less well-developed. Her mother decided to leave Westport with her daughters when she was a young, grieving widow. That she created a new life for them in Los Angeles and never spoke to her daughters of their father—or, it will turn out, of their grandmother, Opal—suggests that Maureen is selfish, distant, and self-absorbed in a way that Piper is not. Maureen lets Daniel decide how to punish Piper and how long her term of exile will be. Maureen’s warning to Piper to beware of Westport men foreshadows how Piper will fall for Brendan but also lays the ground for the internal conflict Piper will experience when she realizes Brendan has a dangerous job, the same job that killed her father.
The switch to Brendan’s point of view to introduce Westport shows that Brendan is closely aligned with the town, rooted there, and loyal to its traditions, ways, and residents. The noisy, convivial atmosphere of the bar shows that Brendan has close relationships but the story that Randy tells, about waves they experienced while crabbing, emphasizes how Henry died and foreshadows the accident that will later occur on Brendan’s boat.
Brendan’s point of view is very masculine—he immediately notices Piper’s breasts—but his determination not to admire her shows that his guard is up. The reader sees that he is immediately interested, but fighting that interest. Brendan’s hostility toward Piper for being an outsider who wants to upset his routine and take over “his” bar sets up the enemies-to-lovers trope upon which the plot will turn. But his antagonism is also rooted in his protectiveness toward the town and its citizens, the feeling that he is responsible for both his crew and their families. This protectiveness of himself and others will lead to conflicts with Piper later, but his internal conflict makes Brendan relatable and likable as a hero.
The “meet cute” in the bar and the apartment above establishes the “enemies” part of the enemies-to-lovers arc for both leads as well as the contrasts between Piper’s glamorous life in LA and the shabby, mice-infested place she finds herself. Her comment about not feeling like she belongs shows the beginnings of self-reflection but also, importantly, provides a flash of vulnerability that tells Brendan she is not all glamorous surface.
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