To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han

If I believed in half stars, which I don’t because there isn’t a half star button, I would give this 3.5. But I believe in rounding up because I am a good person, and because I think that one should read generously and with an open heart. I’m haven’t quite decided in my rating quite yet! But I did really like this book. And I sorta expected not to. 

Jenny Han writes families so well. I loved the Song girls. And the Covey family in general. And meeting Peter’s family and hearing about Josh’s and Gen’s. It really makes her characters feel even more real when you have a sense of the people they come from. I adore that about Jenny Han books. 

I don’t love her friendships quite as much. Lara Jean And Chris had very little page time together so you really couldn’t see why they would live each other. Chris was a supportive and good friend when she needed to step up, but the ways in which she was characterized did not really give her much nuance and we didn’t get to really fall in love with her. 

I also think this book was more slut shame-y than it needed to be. I get that there was a bit where maybe we are meant to like learn that that is a bad thing but if that was the case I don’t think it was executed well. There was literally one line about how slut-shaming is unfair to girls and incentivizes boys lying/bragging/being rude to girls. I think this could have been done better if Lara Jean had realized she had been being rude to her best friend about this the whole book, or if there had been any other way to show that having sex doesn’t make you evil but it is very mean to belittle someone for having had sex no matter if they had or if it was a malicious rumor. 

I also think Jenny Han has like ¾ of a “be less judgmental” character arc for Lara Jean but I don’t think we really saw the kind of scenes that could have shown us progress.  

Also, there were ways in which Lara Jean has obviously had to deal with hardship, but, as with the Summer trilogy, her characters are so so privileged money wise and no one seems cognisant of money in a way that makes them feel real. Not every book needs to be about people who have to think about money but these characters just seem so privileged in a way I am not sure if it’s intentional? Like duh, rich people don’t really talk about how rich they are but it just felt very opulent in a way that made me feel odd. I’m not sure if that wealth thing played into the ways in which I felt Lara Jean was quite childish and sort of unaware of the world around her, but I also had those feelings. And I know it is realistic but I kind of hate the trope of girls having to take care of a grown man. 

Regarding the childishness, maybe I’m expecting too much perfection out of my female protagonist. Maybe. I can be critical of some aspects and still enjoy it. I think that maybe my bigger issue with her childishness was I couldn’t tell if it was intentional, again probably because I thought the protagonist in the Summer trilogy was maybe childish and self-absorbed. Characters do need to have flaws to be interesting characters. And there was plenty Jenny Han did very very well with Lara Jean. She felt like a rounded character, she had interests and hobbies that were consistently mentioned and she had interests that did not 100% feed into the plot, she felt like she could exist outside of this story. And I 100% knew 16-year-olds who felt younger than that to me, but maybe I just felt she was a tad to little kid for her age.

I wasn’t feeling the romance for a while, Peter was falling flat as a character for me and he didn’t really seem that deep even by the end of the book. I also hate Jenny Han’s obsession/thing with people dating or trying to date siblings. Please, stop this. It is both unrealistic and icky. I might know one person who dated brothers, and I think it was an I held hands with a boy in middle school then four years later I dated his brother thing. And even she thought that was a bit odd. But by the end, I was shipping Lara Jean and Peter K hardcore. They ended up being cute and I really love a good open but hopeful ending. Though I will be reading book two. 

I am hoping Peter gets a deeper personality, Chris and Lara Jean have more showing of their friendship and not telling, and that Lara Jean no longer has a thing with Josh. That would bum me out hard.

Again I loved the Song girls. I really felt like Margo and Lara Jean And Kitty we’re so real. I could see myself and my friends and sisters in each of them at times. It is wonderful to look at a character and see yourself or someone you know mirrored back to you and to also be able to look at the words on the page and feel that’s characters breath. I can’t wait to see more of the Song girls.

I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads and finished it on October 16th, 2018.