Rayne's Reviews > To All the Boys I've Loved Before

To All the Boys I've Loved Before is the mind-numbingly boring and uninteresting story of a whiny, self-centered, over-dramatic, and unbelievably oblivious privileged girl who's supposed to be 16 but actually sounds like she's 12 and has the flattest, dullest, most insipid narrative voice I've ever read in Contemporary YA. Seriously, I'm still trying to work out how this girl's brain had the capacity to let her walk and breathe at the same time.

The entire plot of this novel is ridiculous. If you really are that close to your sister then there's no way you could ever, ever, ever, ever look at her boyfriend in a romantic way. And yes, I know, she liked him first, but I fail to see how she could've pined for him during and after the relationship he had with her sister, and even worse, I have no idea how anyone could not be immediately grossed out at the person after learning he has been intimate with her sister. I don't know about you, but dating one of my siblings has a tendency giving that person the sexual and romantic appeal of 2-week-old roadkill. Moreover, the guy was actually kind of creepy and controlling. And yes, she comes to the realization that maybe she never liked him at all, but that just opened another can of worms with this protagonist: this girl knows nothing about life, about love, about herself. She's so childish and immature, so dreamy and oblivious, so pampered, selfish and silly, it's hard not to be annoyed with her, especially because she never grows in the book, she never develops or learns anything, she just keeps finding excuses to justify everything all the way to the end.

This book chronicles the surprisingly uneventful life of this girl down to even that most insignificant of details. Quite frankly, the only interesting parts I found were when they were talking about food. This book either consistently annoyed me or made me really hungry. It took me such a long time to stop being bored with this book, and that moment came when Lara Jean and Peter's bond started to develop. And then it died again, fairly quickly, with all the jealousy, love triangle crap, mean girl drama, whining and that abrupt, non-conclusive ending to force a sequel. For about a 100 pages I finally managed to be entertained by this book, I finally found something to care about, and then it all came back to being unbelievably boring and uneventful with tons of whining about maybe liking this guy and this guy maybe not liking her even though the guy literally came up to her said "I like you", but knowing better than he does that he still likes his bitchy ex girlfriend and so on and so forth.



So, why that second star? Because there were part of the novels I connected with, things Lara Jean said that, surprisingly, were genuine, relevant and heart-felt. I loved that we have a POC as an MC, first of all. There was also the cultural shock of being biracial in a mainly white place, though it is not exactly a big point in the novel, there is some importance placed on accepting her Korean heritage; the strong bond between sisters; what it's like to be in a competitive household and live under somebody else's shadow; what it's like to feel unappreciated and ignored and the fear of tackling something different and scary but good for you. Those were the few things I managed to appreciate from this novel because they were sincere and realistic. Everything else was just typical teen BS about faking relationships to impress/enrage someone else and then falling for the person. After reading Burn for Burn, I kind of expected better from this author, but I see that this series is just not for me.