Below is the complete list of Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before Books
About To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series is a three-novel coming-of-age romance centered on Lara Jean Song Covey, a sixteen-year-old whose carefully private emotional life becomes public when five letters she wrote to former crushes are unexpectedly mailed. The premise gives the opening book its comic momentum, but the trilogy develops into something broader: a story about first love, sisterhood, Korean American family identity, grief, domestic ritual, and the uneasy transition from imagining adulthood to making choices that can genuinely alter the future.
Lara Jean has never intended anyone to read the letters. She writes them as a way of ending feelings she cannot otherwise resolve, then stores them in a hatbox given to her by her late mother. When the letters reach their recipients, she loses control of a romantic history that had existed safely in her head. One recipient is Josh, the former boyfriend of her older sister Margot; another is Peter Kavinsky, a popular classmate with complications of his own. Lara Jean and Peter’s decision to pretend they are dating creates the central relationship of the series, but Han is less interested in sustaining a simple fake-dating device than in showing what happens when performance begins producing real attachment.
The Covey household gives the trilogy much of its character. Lara Jean lives with her widowed father and her sisters, Margot and Kitty, and the bonds among the three girls are as important as any romance. Margot has assumed considerable responsibility since their mother’s death, Lara Jean finds comfort in home and familiar routines, and Kitty is younger but often more perceptive and forceful than either sister expects. Cooking, baking, holidays, clothing, gifts, family traditions, and ordinary arguments create a detailed domestic world that makes emotional change feel consequential. Growing up threatens not only Lara Jean’s romantic expectations but the stability of a family structure she deeply values.
P.S. I Still Love You tests the difference between entering a relationship and understanding how to remain inside one. Lara Jean’s feelings for Peter are real, yet first love brings jealousy, uncertainty, and the persistence of earlier attachments. The return of John Ambrose McClaren, another recipient of one of her letters, forces her to confront the possibility that affection does not always arrange itself into one obvious choice. Han treats romantic confusion as part of Lara Jean’s developing self-knowledge rather than merely a contest between two boys.
By Always and Forever, Lara Jean, the trilogy’s pressure has shifted again. College decisions, her father’s remarriage, Margot’s return, and the approaching end of high school make change unavoidable. Lara Jean and Peter can no longer think only about whether they love each other; they must consider what happens when two people’s futures do not unfold according to the same plan. The final novel gives particular weight to Lara Jean’s attachment to home, because leaving familiar spaces and relationships is one of the hardest forms of independence for a character who has always found meaning in preserving them.
Across the three books, letters remain an important symbol even after the original crisis has passed. Lara Jean is a character who often understands feelings by shaping them into private narratives before she can express them directly. The trilogy gradually pushes her beyond that protected interior world. Love becomes less about fantasy, secrecy, and perfect imagined outcomes, and more about risk, embarrassment, compromise, and accepting that uncertainty cannot be eliminated.
The series later became a trilogy of films, while its fictional world expanded through the screen spin-off XO, Kitty, centered on Lara Jean’s younger sister. On the page, however, the original trilogy remains tightly focused on Lara Jean’s growth. Its enduring appeal comes from the balance between romance and home life: falling in love matters, but so do sisters, parents, memory, cultural inheritance, and the difficult realization that becoming an adult means allowing cherished relationships to change without assuming that change must destroy them.