Most people seem to either adore this book or find it painfully dull, and I landed somewhere in the uncomfortable middle — folding laundry on a Sunday afternoon, wincing through secondhand embarrassment so intense I had to pause and sit down on my bed, surrounded by half-folded towels, physically cringing for a fictional sixteen-year-old girl whose secret love letters had just been mailed to every boy she'd ever crushed on. And yet, by the final chapter, I understood the frustration of the people who gave it two stars.
Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before — here in its German audiobook edition translated by Birgitt Kollmann — follows Lara Jean Covey, a half-Korean teenager who processes her feelings by writing deeply personal love letters she never intends to send. She stashes them in a hatbox. One day, all five letters escape into the wild. Chaos, obviously, follows.
The premise is killer. It's the kind of setup that practically writes itself, and Han leans into it with a breezy, first-person present-tense style that works better in audio than it probably does on the page. You're living inside Lara Jean's head in real time — feeling her panic when she spots Josh (her older sister's ex-boyfriend and one of the letter recipients) walking toward her across the school parking lot, or her confused elation when Peter Kavinsky proposes a fake-dating arrangement to make his own ex jealous. Those early scenes crackle with energy because the stakes feel real and immediate, even when they're objectively small.
Leonie Landa narrates the German edition, and she's the biggest reason to choose this format over reading the translation silently. One German listener put it perfectly: the narration made them fall in love with the book itself. You can hear the smile in Landa's delivery during the banter scenes with Peter — there's a playfulness that lifts the dialogue right off the page. And when Lara Jean's grief over her mother surfaces quietly beneath a scene about baking or a family dinner, Landa shifts register just enough to let you feel the weight without hammering it.
There's one catch worth flagging. Landa's interpretation skews young. Lara Jean is nearly seventeen, but through Landa's voice, she sometimes sounds closer to twelve. During the fake-dating scenes — which are supposed to carry romantic tension — this age mismatch undercuts the chemistry. I kept recalibrating: right, she's in high school, not middle school. It's not a dealbreaker, but if you're an adult listener hoping to feel swept up in the romance, you may find yourself held at arm's length.
The story itself splits cleanly into what works and what doesn't. Han excels at capturing the specific domestic texture of Lara Jean's life — the way a motherless household held together by a well-meaning dad and three sisters develops its own rituals and shorthand. The baking scenes, the sibling dynamics, the careful way Lara Jean navigates her older sister Margot's departure for college — these moments feel genuine and lived-in. The fake-dating arc with Peter is fun and propulsive, hitting its tropes with confidence.
But here's where my enthusiasm cools: the ending. Or rather, the absence of one. The book doesn't conclude so much as it stops, clearly setting up the sequel. The emotional arc you've invested seven hours in doesn't get a payoff — it gets a cliffhanger. As one frustrated listener noted, the story needed just a few more sentences for a satisfying close. Instead, it leaves you dangling. If you need closure from a single audiobook, queue up the sequel before you start this one.
Landa also narrates P.S. I Still Love You, so you can go straight from one to the next without losing her voice — though fair warning, the ratings suggest the second outing doesn't quite land the same way.
The production is clean — no background noise, no jarring edits, just Landa's voice doing its thing. No music or sound effects, which suits the intimate first-person style. At seven hours and twenty-two minutes, it's a quick listen that never drags.
So here's the blunt version. Listen if you enjoy low-stakes teen romance with strong family scenes and you're fine accepting a sequel-bait ending that resolves nothing major. Skip if you need the narrator to sound age-appropriate for a seventeen-year-old, want sharper plot momentum, or expect a self-contained story. The book offers more psychological depth into Lara Jean than the Netflix movie does, but less forward motion.
Han handles forward motion better elsewhere — It's Not Summer Without You keeps a tighter grip on momentum while still doing that same quiet domestic texture she's so good at.
Landa's narration genuinely elevates the material — she takes scenes that could feel thin on the page and gives them emotional specificity. But she can't fix a story that runs out of road before it reaches a destination. For the right listener, this is a cozy, funny, slightly heartbreaking seven hours. For the wrong one, it's a slow walk to a locked door.
The laundry, by the way, did eventually get folded. But not until after I'd finished the last chapter and immediately looked up whether the sequel was available.
