To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before Study Guide

Jenny Han was born and grew up in Richmond, Virginia, to Korean immigrant parents. Though she started writing at age seven, she also felt the pressure that she suggests many children of immigrants feel to pursue a “practical” profession, such as medicine or law. But her parents supported her writing aspirations. While working on her MFA at New York University, Han worked in a bookstore in their children’s section and also spent several years as a school librarian. This immersed her in the world of children’s and teen lit. She wrote and published her first novel, Shug, at the same time as she was finishing graduate school. Since Shug, Han has written several trilogies, including The Summer I turned Pretty trilogy, Burn for Burn trilogy, and To All the Boys trilogy. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was Han’s first novel that featured an Asian American protagonist, and it catapulted her to fame. She was involved in adapting and producing all three of the Netflix films. Han lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Lara Jean is very caught up in her own world, so she doesn’t make any observations about what’s going on in the wider world. However, she is very cognizant of the pressures facing upper-middle-class high school students in the mid-2010s, such as the pressure to participate in as many extracurricular activities as possible in the hope of being accepted to a prestigious college. She mentions that Margot is a National Merit Scholar, which means that Margot got very high scores on the standardized PSAT test (a practice for the SAT that, for high-scoring students, also offers scholarships). Though Lara Jean’s identity as a Korean American isn’t a huge focus of the novel, she does complain on Halloween that there are few Asian American characters to dress up as, aside from Cho Chang from the Harry Potter series. Indeed, it took several years for To All the Boys to be adapted into a film as several studios insisted on making Lara Jean white, something that Jenny Han rejected outright. But the fact that the 2018 film adaptation of To All the Boys became one of Netflix’s most popular offerings (and that other films with predominately or entirely nonwhite casts, such as the adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel Crazy Rich Asians and Marvel’s Black Panther, were box-office and critical hits) suggests this is beginning to change. In interviews, Han has noted that she’s been happy to see Asian American girls dressing up as Lara Jean for Halloween in the years since the film came out.

Jenny Han continues Lara Jean’s story in two follow-up novels, P.S. I Still Love You and Always and Forever, Lara Jean. And though Han is best known for the To All the Boys series, she’s been a force in the children’s and young adult literature world since she published her first novel, Shug, in 2006. To All the Boys shares many similarities with novels like Julie Buxbaum’s Tell Me Three Things and Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything—both are young adult romances featuring protagonists working through the loss of a parent. Han credits her success as a writer of teen romances to J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series, which she suggests legitimized children’s literature as a genre and established books for kids as ones worth purchasing in hardcover. She also credits Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series popularized teen romances. Han has also said that Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women inspired To All the Boys—she was curious about what a story focusing on a character like Beth (who’s a homebody due to illness) would look like.