There is a particular kind of intimacy that Jenny Han achieves in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before that most contemporary YA novelists only approximate. Published in 2014 and released on Netflix to 85 million viewers in 2018, the novel about Lara Jean Song Covey and her inadvertently mailed love letters accomplished something the industry had been circling around for years without quite landing: it made emotional restraint feel more romantic than any grand declaration ever could. The hatbox. The letters. The slow-burn performance of a fake relationship that quietly becomes the realest thing in the room. Jenny Han understood something essential: that the interior life of a teenage girl, rendered with honesty and without condescension, is irresistible to readers of every age.
Publisher’s Weekly captured the downstream effect in what they aptly termed “the Han Effect,” a measurable spike in demand for similarly warm-hearted, emotionally literate romantic comedies across both publishing and film. Approximately 55 percent of YA readers are adults, a statistic the industry had been quietly sitting on for years, and To All the Boys made the case loudly and publicly that young adult romance was not a lesser genre but a distinct and demanding one. The novel spent 40 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and has since been published in 30 languages. The sequel, P.S. I Still Love You, won the Young Adult 2015-2016 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a recognition that spoke directly to what made the series feel different: Lara Jean is half-Korean American, and her cultural identity is rendered not as a political statement but as a lived, specific, beautifully ordinary reality.
What I find most worth interrogating as a reader and critic is what exactly we are reaching for when we reach for a book like this one. It is not merely the fake-dating trope, though that mechanism is satisfying in the way that only a well-designed narrative trap can be. It is not just the Korean skincare routines and the Yakult drinks and the vintage aesthetic that defines Lara Jean’s wardrobe. It is the particular texture of a young woman’s inner world, rendered so precisely that recognition arrives almost before comprehension. The list below is my attempt to map that territory broadly, honoring both the emotional intelligence of Han’s achievement and the many fine novels that share its spirit without simply replicating its plot.
I have organized these twenty titles not by quality ranking but by reader temperament. This feels more honest to how we actually seek out books: not as interchangeable units of a genre but as specific responses to specific longings.
For Readers Who Feel the Peculiar Ache of Epistolary Longing
Han’s novel is, at its core, a book about letters that were never meant to be read. There is something deeply human in that premise, the gap between what we feel and what we dare to express, and several novels inhabit that space with comparable grace.
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
I will say what I believe without apology: Eleanor & Park is one of the finest young adult novels written in the last twenty years, and it belongs on this list not as filler but as the standard-bearer. Set in 1986 Omaha, it tells the story of two misfit teenagers who fall in love over comic books and mix tapes on a school bus. Rainbow Rowell writes young love the way it actually feels: not cinematic, not inevitable, but achingly provisional. There is always the sense that everything wonderful could end at any moment, because in adolescence it can and does.
What connects it to To All the Boys is not plot mechanics but emotional architecture. Both novels understand that the most romantic gestures are the small, private ones. The way Park notices Eleanor’s earrings. The way Lara Jean tracks Peter’s habits before she admits she loves him. Rowell’s prose has a quality I can only describe as precision without coldness, and her willingness to let the ending be genuinely ambiguous sets the novel apart from more commercially cautious fare. The last line remains, years after I first read it, one of the most quietly devastating in the genre.
Tell Me Three Things by Julie Buxbaum
Buxbaum’s 2016 novel operates on a premise that is, if anything, more overtly epistolary than Han’s: Jessie, a newly relocated high school junior in Los Angeles, begins receiving anonymous emails from someone calling himself Somebody/Nobody, who serves as her guide to navigating an unfamiliar school. The mystery of his identity becomes the engine of the narrative, but what sustains it is Buxbaum’s gift for interiority.
What I appreciate most about this novel is its refusal to simplify grief. Jessie is dealing with the recent death of her mother, and Buxbaum does not use this as mere backstory; it saturates every relationship in the book. The romance that develops through the anonymous correspondence is genuinely touching because both parties are allowed to be incomplete. Fans of Lara Jean’s internal monologue will find a close cousin in Jessie’s voice, wry and self-aware and occasionally undone by feeling.
Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson
Morgan Matson’s Since You’ve Been Gone opens with a list, which is the kind of structural confidence I always admire. Emily’s best friend Sloane has vanished for the summer, leaving behind a list of tasks that seem, to Emily, essentially impossible. The list becomes both a scavenger hunt and a self-discovery narrative, and Matson executes both registers with considerable skill.
The thematic resonance with To All the Boys runs deeper than the surface premise. Both novels are about young women who have defined themselves in relation to others, and who must discover what they want and who they are when the familiar structures are removed. The romantic subplot in Matson’s book earns its resolution in exactly the way that satisfying romance should: through accumulation of honest moments rather than a single climactic gesture.
For Readers Who Love Fake Dating as a Vessel for Something Realer
The fake-dating trope is one of the most durable mechanisms in romantic fiction precisely because it creates a structural irony that writers can mine almost indefinitely: the performance of intimacy that gradually reveals authentic feeling. Han executes it beautifully. So do these novelists.
Tweet Cute by Emma Lord
Emma Lord’s 2020 debut is one of the cleverest constructions in recent YA romance, and I mean that as genuine praise rather than a backhanded compliment. Pepper runs her family’s corporate fast-food social media account; Jack runs his family’s local deli Twitter. What begins as a very online corporate rivalry escalates into a culture-war proxy battle between Big League Burger and his grandmother’s grilled cheese recipe, while simultaneously Pepper and Jack are falling for each other on an anonymous app he built.
The dual-narrative structure allows Lord to do something elegant: we know before the characters do that their anonymous connection and their public antagonism are two halves of the same story. This situational irony is the emotional equivalent of the To All the Boys fake-dating setup, producing genuine comedy and genuine feeling in equal measure. Lord’s dialogue is especially sharp, the kind that reads as effortless but is anything but.
I Hope This Doesn’t Find You by Ann Liang
This 2024 novel arrived with considerable literary buzz, and I think the buzz was warranted. Valedictorian Sadie Wen drafts furious, deeply felt emails to everyone who frustrates her, particularly her co-captain Julius Gong, and then meticulously avoids sending them. When the emails go out accidentally, the entire architecture of her self-presentation collapses.
The parallel to To All the Boys is almost architectural: both novels hinge on private communications that escape into the world, forcing their writers to reckon with emotions they had carefully contained. What distinguishes Liang’s novel is the additional layer of academic pressure and the specificity of the overachiever’s psychology. Sadie’s compulsive perfectionism feels observed rather than invented, and her eventual vulnerability is earned in a way that many novels in this space fail to achieve. Liang demonstrates that the accidental-exposure premise is not merely a plot device but a genuine metaphor for what happens when the self we present meets the self we actually are.
Faking Forever by Tracy Wolff
Wolff’s entry into the fake-dating canon takes place within a wedding context that sharpens both the comedy and the emotional stakes. Two strangers who meet at a resort are pressed by circumstance into presenting themselves as a couple, and the resulting negotiation of public performance versus private unease is handled with real wit.
What I find specifically useful about this novel for readers seeking To All the Boys adjacency is its treatment of self-protection as a romantic obstacle. The characters resist their feelings not because of external complications but because of internal ones, which is, I would argue, the more interesting version of this story. The writing is pleasurably breezy without being thin, and Wolff’s comic timing translates well to prose.
For Readers Who Need the Cultural Specificity to Feel Seen
One of the most significant things To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before accomplished was placing an Asian American girl at the center of a mainstream romantic narrative without treating her ethnicity as either a source of conflict or an accessory. The books below honor that legacy, each approaching questions of cultural identity with intelligence and warmth.
I Believe in a Thing Called Love by Maurene Goo
Maurene Goo is, in my estimation, the natural successor to Jenny Han’s particular blend of warmth and wit. I Believe in a Thing Called Love follows Desi Lee, academically exceptional but romantically incompetent, who decides to approach her love life the same way she approaches everything else: with a systematic, research-backed plan. She turns to Korean dramas as her instructional text, which is both very funny and quietly poignant.
This is a novel that earns its warmth because it earns its comedy first. Goo understands that humor is not the opposite of feeling but often its precondition, and Desi’s doomed attempts to follow rom-com scripts produce scenes of genuine, cringing recognition. The father-daughter relationship at the novel’s center is rendered with particular care, adding emotional ballast that elevates the book beyond the merely entertaining.
From Twinkle, with Love by Sandhya Menon
Sandhya Menon writes her novels in an epistolary structure, with From Twinkle, with Love taking the form of letters Twinkle writes to her favorite female filmmakers. Twinkle is a would-be director who navigates a love triangle while making a short film for her school’s summer festival.
What connects this novel to Han’s work is less the romantic mechanics than the shared conviction that a teenage girl’s creative ambitions are as worthy of narrative attention as her love life. Menon grants Twinkle an artistic identity that exists independently of the boys in her orbit, and the eventual romantic resolution feels more satisfying as a result. The epistolary framing also gives Menon’s prose a quality of confessional immediacy that readers of Han’s interior-monologue-driven narrative will find familiar.
When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon
Menon’s debut novel is, I think, slightly more architecturally assured than From Twinkle, and I include both because they reward comparison. Dimple Shah is a Stanford-bound computer science devotee who wants nothing to do with the arranged marriage her parents have quietly arranged with Rishi Patel. Rishi, meanwhile, arrives at their summer coding program believing they are already, essentially, a couple.
The comedy of this collision is immediate, but Menon sustains it across the full length of the novel without allowing it to calcify into mere sitcom mechanics. Dimple’s trajectory from resistant to genuinely feeling is managed with the kind of psychological credibility that distinguishes literary romance from its lesser cousins. The novel is also notable for its specific engagement with Indian American family dynamics, rendering cultural expectation and personal aspiration as genuinely in tension rather than simply resolving one in favor of the other.
Frankly in Love by David Yoon
David Yoon’s 2019 debut is sharper-edged than the others in this section, and I mean that as high praise. Frank Li is secretly dating a white girl in a household where his Korean-immigrant parents have made their preference for Korean partners unambiguously clear. To satisfy his parents, he enters into a fake-dating arrangement with Joy Song, whose parents have the same expectations.
Yoon does something bold with this premise: he takes the fake-dating mechanism that Han uses for romantic comedy and deploys it as a vehicle for examining the specific costs of cultural assimilation. Frank’s narration has a wry, searching quality, and his moral reckoning over the course of the novel is more complicated than the genre typically demands. This is a book that respects its readers enough to leave them with genuine questions rather than only satisfying answers.
For Readers Who Want Romantic Tension Set Against Unforgettable Places
Lara Jean’s suburban Virginia world is rendered with such specific warmth that place becomes almost a character in the novel. The books below understand that setting is not backdrop but emotional atmosphere, and each one uses location as part of its romantic argument.
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
I have recommended this novel so many times that it almost embarrasses me. Anna Oliphant is shipped by her novelist father to a boarding school in Paris for her senior year, and she arrives furious, friendless, and fundamentally unprepared for Étienne St. Clair. The novel is, on its surface, a love story. But it is also a meditation on the specific homesickness that comes from being displaced from everything that makes you legible to yourself.
Perkins writes Paris without postcard condescension. The city is specific and atmospheric but not twee, and the romantic tension she generates between Anna and Étienne is the slow, almost unbearable kind that works best in fiction because it would be genuinely maddening in life. The novel was originally self-published, a fact that publishing insiders often cite as evidence that the industry’s gatekeeping mechanisms sometimes fail at precisely the moments when they matter most.
The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
Nicola Yoon’s second novel makes an argument that I find both structurally audacious and thematically moving: that a single day in New York City is sufficient time for two strangers to fall irreversibly in love, even when the circumstances surrounding that love are genuinely tragic.
Natasha is Jamaican American and faces deportation. Daniel is Korean American and faces parental pressure to pursue medicine rather than poetry. Yoon alternates perspectives with chapters that are occasionally as short as a paragraph, and she intersperses brief, lyrical digressions on the histories of objects and people who intersect with her characters. This structural fragmentation reflects the novel’s central preoccupation with fate and contingency, and it works better than it has any right to. Readers who responded to the particularity of Lara Jean’s cultural identity will find a similarly specific and politically alert consciousness in both Natasha and Daniel.
Somewhere Only We Know by Maurene Goo
I return to Goo because she has written essentially a companion piece to her other work in terms of emotional register, and this one deserves its own attention. Somewhere Only We Know unfolds over a single night in Hong Kong, where Lucky is a Korean pop star on tour and Jack is an American tabloid journalist trying to get her photograph.
The compressed timeline is a structural risk that Goo executes with impressive control. The novel operates on the same logic as those classic Hollywood screwball comedies where the romantic comedy premise serves as a container for something more vulnerable and searching. The setting of Hong Kong, rendered with care and affection rather than exoticism, gives the novel a visual richness that transfers well onto the page.
For Readers Who Want the Whole Complicated Architecture of Family
What distinguishes To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before from comparable entries in the genre is the centrality of the Covey family. Lara Jean’s relationship with her sisters, her widowed father, and her late mother is not backdrop for the romance but its emotional foundation. The books below share that conviction.
The Way You Make Me Feel by Maurene Goo
If I am recommending Goo three times on this list, it is because she is genuinely the writer working most consistently in Han’s emotional register, and intellectual honesty requires me to say so plainly. The Way You Make Me Feel follows Clara, the daughter of a Korean-Brazilian food truck owner, who is sentenced to spend her summer working on her father’s truck after a prank goes wrong.
The novel is, beneath its romantic comedy surface, a story about a daughter and her father learning to see each other clearly. Goo handles this relationship with the same care Han brings to Lara Jean’s relationship with her father, and the result is a novel that earns its happy ending not through narrative manipulation but through genuine emotional accumulation. The love interest, Hamlet (yes, that is his name), is pleasingly un-conventional, and the food truck setting provides a sensory richness that makes the whole novel feel almost edible.
Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
Yoon’s debut is a structural experiment that works, which is a rarer achievement than it sounds. Madeline has never left her house due to a rare immune deficiency, and the novel is told through a collage of diary entries, emails, illustrations, and book reviews. When the boy next door moves in and begins communicating with her through their respective windows, the romance that develops has an intensity produced by constraint.
I would place Everything, Everything in a slightly darker emotional key than most of the others on this list, particularly as the novel’s central twist demands. But the interiority it creates, the specific texture of a young woman’s imagined world, has genuine kinship with Lara Jean’s private emotional universe. Both novels are, in different ways, about the difficulty of letting other people in when you have built your inner life as a fortress.
Once and for All by Sarah Dessen
Sarah Dessen is an author I have been reading since before most of the readers this list is aimed at were born, and her staying power is not accidental. Once and for All is perhaps her most structurally complex novel: Louna, who has sworn off love after a tragic loss, takes a summer job at her mother’s wedding planning business and meets the charming, serial-romantic Ambrose.
What I find most interesting about this novel, from a craft perspective, is Dessen’s use of alternating timelines. The present-day story of Louna and Ambrose unfolds alongside the story of how Louna loved and lost, and this structure means that the reader is always reading two love stories at once. It is a sophisticated technique, and Dessen deploys it without calling attention to itself. Fans of Han’s emotional directness will respond to Dessen’s warmth, even if the texture of her prose is somewhat more conventional.
For Readers Who Want Their Romance Shot Through with Identity and Self-Discovery
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is, among other things, a novel about a young woman learning who she is outside the reflections others offer her. These final books take that theme and pursue it with comparable seriousness.
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
Becky Albertalli’s debut is so assured in its construction that I sometimes have to remind myself it is a debut. Simon Spier is gay and has not yet come out, conducting a secret email correspondence with a classmate who calls himself Blue. When another classmate discovers the emails, Simon’s privacy is weaponized against him.
The parallels to To All the Boys are structural and thematic. Both novels hinge on the exposure of private correspondence, and both use that exposure to force a reckoning with authentic feeling versus performed identity. But Albertalli does something specific with this material that Han does not need to: she interrogates the ways in which coming out is always, to some degree, a performance of one’s inner life for an external audience. The comedy is warm and the emotional stakes are genuinely high. This is a novel that changed the market for queer YA, and it deserves that recognition.
I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver
Deaver’s novel explores what happens when Ben De Backer, who is nonbinary, is kicked out of their parents’ home after coming out and must navigate a new school and a new life while staying with their estranged sister. The romance that develops is tender and carefully observed, and Deaver writes the experience of existing in public as a gender-nonconforming person with specificity that avoids both melodrama and sentimentality.
The connection to To All the Boys is less about plot mechanics than about emotional sensibility: both novels are about young people who exist, for various reasons, slightly outside the dominant social script, and who discover that love sometimes arrives precisely because of that marginality, not despite it.
The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
I include this one as an outlier, and I stand by the choice. Barnes writes what I would call romantic thriller, a genre that is more technically demanding than either component suggests, and The Inheritance Games is her finest work in it. Avery Grambs, who has no known connection to a deceased billionaire named Tobias Hawthorne, is named as the sole beneficiary of his estate, to the fury of his actual family.
The Hawthorne brothers, Grayson and Jameson in particular, constitute a love interest situation that is considerably more complicated than Peter Kavinsky, but the underlying dynamic, a girl at the center of an elaborate game she did not design, trying to trust her own instincts about who deserves her heart, maps onto the To All the Boys emotional architecture in surprising ways. Barnes constructs puzzles within puzzles and romantic tension within tension, and the result is genuinely compulsive reading. The novel launched a franchise of five books, all of which maintain a standard that the first one sets very high.
You’d Be Mine by Annie Cardi
This is the novel I always recommend last on a list like this, because it requires more from the reader than the others and delivers correspondingly more in return. Two famous musicians in the country music world, Annie Mathers and Cole Cooley, are packaged together by their labels as a romantic pair for commercial purposes. Neither wants this. Both gradually change their minds.
The fake-dating mechanics are here, but the setting gives the novel its specific flavor: the country music industry, rendered with the cynicism of someone who has researched it carefully and the affection of someone who genuinely loves the music. Cole is one of the more psychologically interesting love interests in recent YA, with a backstory that complicates his charm without excusing it. Cardi writes romantic tension the way it actually operates: not as a sequence of significant moments but as a sustained atmospheric pressure that eventually becomes too much to contain.
A Final Note on What We Are Really Looking For
When I read To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before for the first time, what struck me most forcefully was not the plot mechanics or even the romantic chemistry. It was the specificity of Lara Jean’s inner life. Her love of baking, her vintage aesthetic, her letters. The novel made the case that the most intimate knowledge of a person is the knowledge of what they love privately.
The books on this list make that same case in twenty different registers. Some are funnier, some are sadder, some are more architecturally daring. But each one trusts that a young woman’s interior life is worth this kind of sustained, careful attention. In a publishing landscape that has historically underestimated both its young adult readers and its female ones, that trust is itself a kind of argument.
Jenny Han described the experience of launching her Netflix film as “proving that diverse stories are not niche stories.” The books above prove it again, in different ways, in different rooms. I hope you find in them what you found in Lara Jean’s hatbox: something private, something true, and something that knows you back.