To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before Themes

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before introduces readers to 16-year-old Lara Jean a few days before her life turns upside down. Days before she starts her junior year of high school, her beloved older sister Margot leaves for college in Scotland. But things get much worse on the first day of school, when Lara Jean discovers that someone mailed the five private love letters she wrote to her past crushes. As Lara Jean navigates…

At the start of the novel, 16-year-old Lara Jean has never been in a romantic relationship before, though she has been in love with exactly five boys over the last few years. This changes suddenly when the secret letters Lara Jean wrote to those boys get mailed, and to deal with the damage, Lara Jean embarks on a pretend relationship with one of her former crushes, Peter. This is a difficult prospect for Lara…

When 16-year-old Lara Jean discovers that the private goodbye letters that she wrote to five former crushes were sent out without her permission, her first thought is to lie about them—to claim that she never loved the boys, and that she never wrote the letters in the first place. With this, the novel establishes Lara Jean as a person who sees lying as a useful tool to escape embarrassment. As she then embarks on her…