To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Romance · Comedy

Print length: 384 pagesSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2018

Description

Sixteen-year-old Lara Jean keeps a private letter for every boy she has loved, storing the unsent confessions in a hatbox that belonged to her late mother. When her older sister leaves Virginia for university, Lara Jean’s feelings for Josh—her sister’s former boyfriend—become harder to ignore. Then someone mails all the letters, forcing Lara Jean to face the boys who were never supposed to read them. To convince Josh that her feelings have passed, she claims that Peter is her boyfriend, and Peter agrees to the performance. Their rules seem capable of keeping the arrangement simple, but shared time complicates every boundary. The novel combines family change, first love, and social embarrassment in a warm romantic comedy about private feelings becoming public.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Dialogue-driven · Direct

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Humorous · Playful · Romantic · Warm

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

BelongingComing of ageFamilyGriefIdentityLove

About Jenny Han

Jenny Han writes young-adult and children’s fiction, and her career also extends to screenwriting, production, and television. Her novels concentrate on the social and emotional negotiations of adolescence, especially where romance intersects with family loyalty, grief, jealousy, and changing expectations. She works in direct, conversational prose, often using brisk dialogue and comic embarrassment to bring private feelings into public view. Her plots tend to grow from simple devices or recurring settings, then accumulate complications as characters discover that affection does not settle questions of trust or commitment. In The Summer I Turned Pretty, annual visits to a shared beach house give the story a seasonal rhythm, while illness and shifting relationships disturb its familiar rituals. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before turns Lara Jean’s secret letters and a staged romance into a structure for exposing the gap between imagined and lived intimacy. Han later adapted the Summer trilogy for television, while the Lara Jean books became a film series.