To All the Boys I've Loved Before

About the To All the Boys I've Loved Before series

Lara Jean Covey keeps a private ritual: whenever she falls hard enough for a boy, she writes him one goodbye letter, seals it, and hides it away in a hatbox rather than ever telling him how she feels. The trilogy begins when those five letters are mysteriously mailed out without her knowledge, forcing her into painfully real conversations with boys she'd only ever loved from a safe, silent distance -- including her older sister's ex-boyfriend Josh and, more consequentially, Peter Kavinsky, with whom she strikes up a fake relationship to cover her embarrassment that gradually stops being fake at all. Jenny Han writes Lara Jean's first-person voice with a lot of warmth and specificity -- her Korean-American family life, her habit of baking when she's anxious, her old-fashioned crushes on the idea of romance itself -- that made the character feel unusually lived-in for a genre often built on high concept alone.

Across the trilogy the stakes shift from will-they-won't-they into the harder work of a real relationship: jealousy, an ex-boyfriend's return, and eventually the looming question of college and distance that closes out the series. It's Han's most commercially dominant work alongside The Summer I Turned Pretty, and the basis for Netflix's hit film trilogy starring Lana Condor and Noah Centineo, which closely followed the books' plot across all three installments.