PS I Still Love You - Review

P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, # 2)

By: Jenny Han

Published: April 21st 2015 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

288 pages

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary

Source: Personal Kindle Library

( Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository )

*Note: The above links to Amazon and Book Depository are affiliate links. Affiliate links support giveaways for Somewhere Only We Know readers.

Goodreads description--Lara Jean didn’t expect to really fall for Peter.

She and Peter were just pretending. Except suddenly they weren’t. Now Lara Jean is more confused than ever.

When another boy from her past returns to her life, Lara Jean’s feelings for him return too. Can a girl be in love with two boys at once?

In this charming and heartfelt sequel to the New York Times bestseller To All the Boys I've Loved Before, we see first love through the eyes of the unforgettable Lara Jean. Love is never easy, but maybe that’s part of makes it so amazing.

I wasn’t expecting To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before to end in a cliffhanger or to have a sequel. I thought it would be a standalone book. So when I got to the end, I was desperate to know what happens next. And I’m so glad that PS I Still Love You was released for me to find out. I was really liking the Peter/Lara Jean dynamic of transferring from a pretend relationship into something real. And so that cliffhanger ending mixed with the description of PS I Still Love You, which indicates a love triangle, I was a little nervous about starting this book.

One thing is for sure, PS I Still Love You took me on a roller coaster with my emotions. I believe I went through every feeling possible in this book. Love, hate, fear, jealousy, insecurity, confidence, frustration, sympathy, betrayal, regret, heartbreak…I’m sure there’s more. Lara Jean is so real. She’s a young sixteen/seventeen year old. She’s very inexperienced with boys. While she’s had crushes, all of them until now have been unrequited. And Peter’s a lot more experienced than she is. This leaves her feeling insecure. Sometimes her immaturity (for lack of a better word) wasn’t always easy to read. Yet at other times, I completely, 100% remember feeling the exact same way that Lara Jean felt. I could bounce from being frustrated with her to completely supportive in very little time.

Lara Jean’s not just insecure about Peter’s experience, but she also has a really hard time getting over his past relationship with Genevieve. Granted, Genevieve makes this almost impossible for her. On the one hand, Genevieve is going through some family drama that she really does need a friend to help her through—she picks Peter as that friend. On the other hand, you can easily see that Genevieve is manipulative and downright mean to Lara Jean. This is compounded by the fact that Lara Jean and Genevieve used to be friends. But I’ve been in this situation before. I’ve dated the guy who can’t stop being friends with the manipulative ex-girlfriend. I’ve felt like her needs where more important than my own. I could totally relate to Lara Jean. While I didn’t find myself as angry with Peter as I might have 5 years or so ago, I still struggled with his decisions in this area.

Despite my frustrations with how Peter handled Genevieve, I was still rooting for Lara Jean to choose him. I wanted those two to work things out so bad. When John Ambrose McLaren shows back up on the scene and begins his pursuit of Lara Jean’s affections, I was not happy at all. I could just see this turning into one of those stories about the girl who falls in love but realizes that first loves usually don’t last and moves on to a second, more suitable love. While I usually am a fan of these stories, I just wasn’t rooting for that to be that case in this instance. John Ambrose was nice enough, and he probably would have been a decent boyfriend for Lara Jean, but my heart was still with Peter. I won’t tell you how this plays out. I will say that around the 70% mark I had no idea how this book could end in a way that I would be the least bit satisfied with, but by the time everything wrapped up I was satisfied.

One of my favorite aspects of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was the sister relationships that are explored. Lara Jean is the middle child so we see both an older sibling and younger sibling relationship. While the sister-love was present in PS I Still Love You, the dynamics weren’t as complex as Lara Jean is no longer in love with her older sister’s ex-boyfriend and Kitty is not acting out against Lara Jean. Things were much more simple for the trio. We don’t get to see Margot very much, but I think that’s essential for Lara Jean’s growth and progression. Kitty is just as adorable as before. She’s spunky. She loves her sister, but she is completely her own person. And I really enjoyed the two of them. While things might not have been as complex as the previous book, Kitty did complicate matters by being extremely close to Peter and thereby truly affected by the ups and downs of his and Lara Jean’s relationship. This reminded me of myself as well as I tended to get attached to my older sister’s boyfriends growing up as well.

Favorite quotes:

-What I really want to say is Peter will always pick Lara Jean over Genevieve.

-People say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I think they’re wrong: Proximity makes the heart grow fonder.

-Is a boy’s ego really such a fragile, breakable thing? It must be so.

-He doesn’t get it. Girls understand each other in a way boys never will.

-“I deserve better than that, you know? I deserve…I deserve to be someone’s number one girl.”

-I know now that I don’t want to love or be loved in half measures. I want it all, and to have it all, you have to risk it all.

PS I Still Love You was a book that had me hooked. I wanted to know what was going to happen and how it was going to end. But boy did it send me on a roller coaster. I think I felt every emotion possible while reading this book. The entire gambit. In the end, I was happy with what happened, the lessons that needed to be learned, and the end result. Yet, I feel like PS I Still Love is a better book to reflect upon than it was to read. Does that even make sense? I definitely enjoyed it, but I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. PS I Still Love You gets 4 Stars from me. Have you read PS I Still Love You? What did you think? Let me know!

To All the Boys I've Loved Before - Review

To All the Boys I've Loved Before (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, # 1)

By: Jenny Han

Published: April 15th 2014 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

288 pages

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary

Source: Personal Kindle Library ($1.99 Amazon deal)

( Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository )

*Note: The above links to Amazon and Book Depository are affiliate links. Affiliate links support giveaways for Somewhere Only We Know readers.

Goodreads description--To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is the story of Lara Jean, who has never openly admitted her crushes, but instead wrote each boy a letter about how she felt, sealed it, and hid it in a box under her bed. But one day Lara Jean discovers that somehow her secret box of letters has been mailed, causing all her crushes from her past to confront her about the letters: her first kiss, the boy from summer camp, even her sister's ex-boyfriend, Josh. As she learns to deal with her past loves face to face, Lara Jean discovers that something good may come out of these letters after all.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Rachel from Paper Cuts reviewed it and rated it highly. And it just so happened that Amazon had it on sale for $1.99 at the time so I snagged it. And it turned out to be the perfect read for me on my beach trip. I needed a quick, fun, contemporary read and this one fit my mood perfectly. I will say quickly that for some reason I was thinking our main character, Lara Jean, was older. I guess because the title indicates that there are multiple boys that Lara Jean has loved before which indicates a full life. Yet this is more of a crush kind of love—at least her earliest letters.

As the description says, Lara Jean hasn’t told any of the boys she’s had a crush on before that she’s actually liked them. She writes a letter to each one, seals it, and hides in in a hat box that her late mother gave her. One day this guy at school, Peter, comes up to her and confronts her about the letter he got in the mail. Which was amusing and awkward. Poor Lara Jean. I cannot imagine how embarrassed I would have been had I been her. And so she rushes home to find that none of the other letters are in her hat box either. As a matter of fact her hat box is missing. And while it would be embarrassing enough for all her past crushes to get a letter from her, what she’s really concerned about is her friend Josh. He’s actually her sister’s recent ex-boyfriend. They broke up right before she moved to Scotland to attend college. Lara Jean and Josh were friends before Josh ever started dating her sister, Margot. And Lara Jean kept her feelings about Josh to herself for the sake of her sister.

I really loved the way Jenny Han approached this book. Lara Jean has these feelings that she can’t ever act on. A guy that your sister dated, even if you had feelings for him first, is just off-limits. That’s part of the girl code. You wouldn’t date a guy that a friend dated under normal circumstances and that goes doubly for a guy that your sister dated. But Lara Jean wants to be Josh’s friend too so she has to find a way to make it back to normal with him. Peter comes up with the idea of doing a fake relationship with her. He can use her to make his ex-girlfriend Genevieve jealous and Lara Jean can use him to help her get things back to normal with Josh. I loved the relationship that Peter and Lara Jean had. There was no slight romantic tension between the two of them. They were both on a mission, but I loved how they slowly got to know each other and by default their relationship with each other changed. It felt a bit unoriginal, but in one of those ways that is done so well that I can’t find it in me to care that the idea isn’t completely original.

Not only was this book about a girl who’s dealing with past feelings and new, changing romantic feelings, but this book is also about a family. It’s about sisters. Margot, Lara Jean, and Kitty’s mother passed away several years ago. Their father is a doctor and works crazy shifts. Margot really stepped up to take responsibility for her younger sisters and to help her father out around the house. But now Margot is getting ready to move overseas to go to college. Lara Jean is going to miss her so much, but she also has to step up to the role that Margot’s been filling in order to help her father out and take care of Kitty. I loved seeing the relationships between this family. Their father isn’t as present as I would like, but it felt like he wanted to be. And I loved seeing Lara Jean in the middle of her two siblings. So we’ve got the relationship with an older sibling and the relationship with a younger sibling. And sisters no less. Considering I have a sister, this story was especially dear to me. This felt like the best sister relationship story that I’ve read—at least when it comes to being even remotely similar to my own sister relationship. There’s love and friendship, but there’s rivalry and fights as well.

My favorite quotes:

I’d hoped I wouldn’t cry, because I knew Margot wouldn’t, and it’s lonely to cry alone, but I can’t help it.

…it’s a lot of responsibility to hold a person’s heart in your hands.

If you were mine, I would never have broken up with you, not in a million years.

I want to be his lighthouse keeper while we wait for Margot’s return. But it’s hard. Harder than I thought.

To belong to someone—I didn’t know it, but now that I think about it, it seems like that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

When someone’s been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it’s like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you’re just clutching air and grit. That’s why you can’t save it all up like that. Because by the time you finally see each other, you’re catching up only on the big things, because it’s too much bother to tell about the little things. But the little things are what make up life. … Now everything feels like you had to be there and oh never mind, I guess it’s not that funny.

Sisters are supposed to fight and make up, because they are sisters and sisters always find their way back to each other.

There’s a specific kind of fight you can only have with your sister. It’s the kind where you say things you can’t take back. You say them because you can’t help but say them, because you’re so angry it’s coming up your throat and out your eyes; you’re so angry you can’t see straight. All you see is blood.

Overall I was so impressed. Fair warning, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before ends off in a cliffhanger. It was one of those cliffhangers where I NEEDED to know what was going to happen next. Like immediately. Right this minute. If PS I Still Love You was available now I’d have bought it as soon as I reached the last sentence. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before gets 4.5 Stars from me. Have you read To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before? What did you think? Let me know!