Review: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

Happy Book Lovers Day, everyone!
It’s Meg again. I started an account on Bookstagram! I’m pretty active there so I figured I should be writing more consistently on here as well. So here is another book review!

Author: Jenny Han
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Series: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

Summary from Goodreads:
What if all the crushes you ever had found out how you felt about them… all at once?

Sixteen-year-old Lara Jean Song 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 her secret letters are mailed, and suddenly, Lara Jean’s love life goes from imaginary to out of control.

Comments:
I read this book shortly before I found out that there was going to be a movie on Netflix! So, as we await the release of that, here is my review of the book!

I am not a contemporary fan, but they are very easy to read!

Lara Jean is a very relatable teenage girl – I’m sure a lot of girls who’ve had intense crushes wrote about them in their diary, made up secret code names for the boy, thought of ways to get closer to them, etc. I’m pretty sure I was kind of a Lara Jean back in high school. (In fact, I recently took a quiz that tells you which of the Song girls you are most like, and I got Lara Jean.)

And what happens when all the crushes of teenager reads her love letters to them? TATBILB explores the hilarious (and absolutely mortifying!) possibility of if a girl’s secrets get found out.

This book was very cute at times. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I’d read it when I was about Lara Jean’s age. I especially loved the relationships between the Song girls. Jenny Han also inserted some bits of what it’s like being in a Korean-American household, which is pretty cool.

What I didn’t really like was that Lara Jean didn’t really have a good female friend. Chris was the one she considered, but they didn’t even interact that much. Another glaring flaw, and the bigger one really, was that the book has NO ENDING. I remember that I turned the last page and screamed when I found out that it was the end. There wasn’t a particular “closure” of some sort! It was frustrating.

But that is good news for the next book, because I have to read it as well…

And I am really looking forward to seeing the movie adaptation!

“Love is scary: it changes; it can go away. That’s the part of the risk. I don’t want to be scared anymore.”

My Rating: ★★★✰ (3.5)