From Ontario to the Pacific Coast
Prime Video’s Every Year After has arrived with all the slow-burn longing and lakeside nostalgia that made Carley Fortune’s novel Every Summer After a word-of-mouth sensation. It also arrived with a quietly radical set of changes that will catch even devoted readers off guard. Some are cosmetic. Others rewrite entire character arcs from scratch.
Abigail Cowen, who plays Delilah Mason, has already addressed the departures head-on. “We expand on other characters, and I think that’s really fun,” she told Refinery29 Australia. “With Delilah, we get to see a lot more of her and what she’s going through. Same with Chantal. She got to kind of have that creative liberty.” Cowen also acknowledged that some changes are a genuine shock – but argues that tension is exactly what keeps audiences watching.
The Geography Shifted West
In Fortune’s book, Barry’s Bay is planted firmly in Ontario, Canada, and Percy travels there from Toronto. The show relocated the whole story to the opposite edge of the country. Barry’s Bay now sits in British Columbia, and Percy’s home city is Seattle, Washington – a cross-border setup that subtly changes the texture of the distance between her world and Sam’s. The Pacific Northwest backdrop, with its overcast skies and dense shoreline, reads differently than the cottage country of central Ontario, and the production clearly leaned into that aesthetic contrast rather than trying to disguise it.
Percy’s career got a significant downgrade too. In the novel, she holds a senior editor position at a home decor magazine, working alongside her best friend Chantal. The show stripped that back entirely: television Percy is an obituary writer. It’s a detail that sounds almost darkly comedic, but it functions as a visual shorthand for where a decade of regret has left her – professionally adrift, spending her days writing about endings while avoiding the one conversation from her past that never got a real one.
The anatomy scene kiss is another quiet revision. Fortune’s novel places Percy and Sam’s first kiss in 2013, after the two of them watch The Blair Witch Project together. In Every Year After, that moment gets moved to 2014 and relocated to the anatomy scene, which the show had already established as a charged, memorable setting. It’s a small shift in timeline, but it reframes which experiences the show treats as romantically defining – and which ones it’s willing to let go of entirely.
Chantal Gets a Whole Story
Perhaps the most substantial structural change involves Chantal. In Fortune’s book, she never makes it to Barry’s Bay at all – she exists primarily as a voice on the phone, a tether to Percy’s real life while Percy navigates the emotional wreckage of returning to the lake. The show physically brought her in and, in doing so, had to give her something to do once she arrived. The solution was a romance with Jordie, a storyline that has no basis in the source material and was built entirely for the adaptation.
Whether that addition feels organic or obligatory likely depends on how much of the novel’s interiority a viewer is holding onto. For readers who loved Chantal as Percy’s off-screen anchor, watching her become part of the Barry’s Bay story changes the emotional geometry of the whole thing. Prime Video has shown a clear appetite for expanding ensemble dynamics in its romance adaptations, and Chantal and Jordie’s pairing fits that pattern – though it comes at the cost of something the novel handled more quietly.
Delilah’s New Life – and New Complication
Cowen’s character received the most dramatic reinvention of anyone in the adaptation. In Fortune’s novel, Delilah’s situation is significantly more contained. The show pushed her into new territory: television Delilah is married and conducting an affair with Charlie, a storyline that carries its own weight and its own fallout entirely separate from Percy and Sam’s central dynamic. It’s a choice that raises the emotional stakes of her scenes and gives Cowen considerably more to play with – but it also turns Delilah into a different kind of figure than she was on the page.
These changes collectively suggest that the writers were less interested in translating Fortune’s novel scene-for-scene and more interested in using it as structural scaffolding. The emotional core – the decade-long distance, the summer that changed everything, the question of whether two people can actually return to each other – appears to remain intact. But the world around that core has been rebuilt to suit television’s appetite for parallel storylines and expanded ensemble tension.
It’s worth noting that Fortune’s novel worked precisely because of what it withheld. The book’s restraint – Chantal staying home, Delilah kept at a distance, Percy’s career humming along – made the internal devastation feel that much more private. Stripping Percy down to obituary writing and dropping Chantal into the middle of Barry’s Bay are both moves toward exteriority: making internal states visible rather than asking the audience to sit inside them. Whether that trade-off serves the story is the question the show will spend its run trying to answer.
Cowen insists that even the changes that hit hardest will ultimately pull viewers deeper in. That confidence may prove warranted. Or audiences who came for Fortune’s particular brand of quiet devastation will find themselves watching a louder, more populated version of a story they thought they knew – and wondering which kiss, in which year, in which geography, actually counted.
