To All the Boys I've Loved Before
2014
- scandals
- love
- teenage girls
- juvenile fiction
- fiction
- korean american teenagers
- infatuation
- dating (social customs)
- sisters
- love-letters
The story
What if all the crushes you ever had found out how you felt about them… all at once? Sixteen-year-old Lara Jean Covey keeps her love letters in a hatbox her mother gave her. They aren’t love letters that anyone else wrote for her; these are ones she’s written. One for every boy she’s ever loved—five in all. When she writes, she pours out her heart and soul and says all the things she would never say in real life, because her letters are for her eyes only. Until the day that her sister Kathrine, secretly mailed the letters and Lara Jean’s love life goes from imaginary to out of control.
What it’s like
Warm, bright, and sweetly unhurried, this is a book of cozy teen-romance textures: the Covey house in Virginia rendered in small domestic details, sisters bickering over the kitchen counter, the pastel stationery and hatbox of handwritten letters that hold the heart of the story. The prose is breezy, first-person, and conversational, full of wry asides and self-deprecating honesty, so it reads quickly and lightly, like a long afternoon with a friend who tells everything. The mood is gentle comedy with a flutter of embarrassment and yearning, low-stakes and affectionate, with the occasional sharper pang when feelings get tangled. Physical intimacy stays at hand-holding and kisses, with no violence and nothing graphic, and the scandal is social rather than dark. Its people's arcs move from hiding feelings toward owning them, most of all Lara Jean learning to speak up for herself. It suits a rainy Sunday, a comfort reread, or a late-night read for anyone who wants a sweet, funny romance with a warm family at its center, especially readers who enjoy diary-like, voice-driven storytelling.
More books like To All the Boys I've Loved Before
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved To All the Boys I've Loved Beforeand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
