So here's the thing everyone told me about this audiobook: the narrator's male voices are terrible. I went in bracing myself, Sophie screaming about crackers in the background while I loaded it up during her (miraculous) Tuesday nap. And honestly? They're not great. But they're not the dealbreaker I expected either.
Let me back up.
Lara Jean's Love Triangle Hits Different When You're 35
I read the first book in English years ago, pre-kids, and watched all three Netflix movies during various maternity leaves. So picking up the Brazilian Portuguese audiobook version felt like revisiting an old friend in a new outfit. Jenny Han's second installment does what second books in trilogies do - it complicates everything. Lara Jean and Peter Kavinsky are finally in a real relationship, not the fake-dating setup from book one, and she's navigating what it means to actually be someone's girlfriend. Then John Ambrose McClaren shows up like a ghost from her letter-writing past and suddenly she's got two boys and zero idea what she wants.
The thing is, if you're a grown woman listening to a sixteen-year-old's romantic dilemmas, you need the writing to be charming enough that you don't want to shake her. Jenny Han pulls that off. Lara Jean's internal voice is so genuinely sweet - the baking obsession, the way she processes everything through her sisters' reactions, her absolute terror of confrontation - it all works. I finished half the book across three school drop-off runs and one very long evening folding laundry, and I never lost the thread. Survived 47 pauses and still made sense. That's the highest compliment I can give a YA romance. The last audiobook that held me together that well across fragmented listening sessions was Educated — completely different world, but Tara Westover's story has that same quality of pulling you right back in no matter how long you've been away.
Stephany Custodi: Great Heart, Questionable Testosterone
Here's where the popular opinion and my experience split. Stephany Custodi genuinely nails Lara Jean's emotional register. When Lara Jean spirals about whether Peter still has feelings for Gen (his ex - every YA needs one), you can hear the anxiety in Custodi's delivery. The family scenes with Kitty, Lara Jean's younger sister, have this warm, teasing energy that made me miss having a sister instead of two brothers who only text me about fantasy football.
But the boys. Oh, the boys. Peter, John Ambrose, every male character - they all come out of Custodi's mouth sounding like the same vaguely deep monotone. It's like she has one "boy voice" setting and she cranked it for everyone. One reviewer said it almost made them quit, and I get it. During the scenes where Peter and John Ambrose are both present, I genuinely couldn't tell who was talking without context clues from the dialogue. At 1.25x speed (my survival setting), it's even mushier.
Is it a dealbreaker? For me, no. Lara Jean carries this story, and Custodi carries Lara Jean beautifully. But if you're someone who needs distinct character voices to stay engaged - and that's completely fair - this might drive you up the wall.
The Comfort Read That Knows Exactly What It Is
This book isn't trying to reinvent YA romance. It's doing the love triangle, the misunderstandings, the will-they-won't-they with full commitment to being exactly what it is: cozy, sweet, and a little bit predictable. The letter-writing premise from book one gets a nice echo here when Lara Jean starts questioning whether the feelings she wrote about for John Ambrose were ever really gone. And there's a scene at a volunteer event - Lara Jean and John Ambrose working at Belleview retirement home together - where the chemistry is so gentle and nostalgic it almost made me root for the wrong guy.
Almost. (Team Peter forever, sorry.)
At 8 hours and 24 minutes, it's the perfect length for a week of scattered mom-listening. Not so short that it feels like nothing, not so long that I forget who's who between sessions. I wrapped it up sitting in my car in the garage on a Thursday night, engine off, porch light on, just... not ready to go inside yet. Satisfying ending - exactly what I needed.
My Car-Time Recommendation
If you loved the Netflix movies and want to revisit Lara Jean in Portuguese, or if you just need something warm and uncomplicated to get you through a rough week, this delivers. Not groundbreaking, but sometimes you don't need groundbreaking. You need a girl choosing between two nice boys while baking snickerdoodles, and you need to believe everything's going to be okay.
Just... maybe don't try to figure out which boy is talking based on voice alone. Read the room. Or rather, listen to the context.
