46 pages • 1 hour read
Jenny HanP.S. I Still Love You
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Lara Jean Song Covey
Lara Jean is the narrator and main character of this novel. Her former friend Genevieve accuses her of being prissy and “sugary sweet” (330), but she is a more complicated—and formidable—character than that. Though organized and deliberate, she can also be impulsive and flighty, as is seen in her attractions to both Peter and John and her sometimes thoughtless way of handling these attractions. She can also be competitive, insecure, and jealous, as is seen in her reaction to Genevieve.
Part of Lara Jean’s character arc in this novel involves taking stock of her own complexities and her capacity to hurt and confuse the people around her. Lara Jean is a social character, to whom parties, rituals, and events are important. Perhaps because her mother has died, she often takes a maternal role with her father and her sisters, Kitty and Margot, and she also enjoys getting involved in larger community events, such as PTA-sponsored cakewalks and USO-themed cocktail parties at retirement homes. However, her commendable focus on other people has sometimes come at the expense of self-awareness, and her earnest yearning for old-fashioned order and decorum has sometimes made her brittle and inflexible. Her experience with Peter, John, and Genevieve helps her to see this at the end of the novel.
Peter Kavinsky
Peter is Lara Jean’s main love interest in the novel. Like Lara Jean, he is a more complicated character than he seems to be at first. The reader at first sees him through Lara Jean’s wary eyes: as an entitled, careless, and swaggering boy who has more social power and sexual experience than she does. Though capable of sweetness and romantic, chivalrous gestures—such as driving Lara Jean’s younger sister Kitty to school on the day of her 10th birthday—he also seems slippery and unpredictable. It is hard to tell whether his secrecy around his ongoing friendship with Genevieve springs more from deviousness or from loyalty; either way, his protectiveness towards his difficult ex-girlfriend seems unfair to Lara Jean.
However, Peter turns out to have doubts and insecurities of his own beneath his cocky exterior. His attachment to Genevieve turns out to spring from a habit of protectiveness and from a need to be needed. Moreover, Lara Jean’s sexual inexperience and composed, ladylike demeanor makes him feel inadequate, rather than superior; he fears disappointing her and dragging her down to his—and Genevieve’s—level. Lara Jean’s realization of Peter’s vulnerability is as frightening as it is reassuring; it makes her see something that she has not seen before, which is that she has agency and the power to hurt him.
John Ambrose McLaren
John is Lara Jean’s secondary love interest in the novel, and his character serves as a foil for Peter’s character. While Peter is more sensitive than he seems to be at first, John wears his sensitivity on his sleeve. Like Lara, he is studious and somewhat old-fashioned, and he courts her in a measured and old-fashioned way that contrasts with the haphazard beginnings of Lara Jean and Peter’s relationship. The two of them write letters back and forth and dress up in old-fashioned costumes for a USO-themed cocktail party at a retirement home. While Lara Jean makes out in a hot tub with Peter, she goes swing dancing with John; she and John, moreover, are both still virgins, and he declares straightforwardly that he has had a crush on her ever since they were in middle school.
John and Lara Jean are perhaps ultimately too well-matched, and John’s character ultimately a little too good to be true. Lara Jean likes him, but turns out to like Peter more. John might be a more logical choice for her as a boyfriend, but one lesson that Lara Jean learns in this novel is that romance has little to do with logic.
Genevieve
Genevieve is a character who is easy to dislike and who seems to revel in stirring up drama and trouble. While the narrative never warms up to Genevieve, she does later appear as sympathetic. Genevieve’s hard, manipulative persona, as well as her dependence on her ex-boyfriend, turns out to spring from a troubled home life. Moreover, her excessively tough demeanor turns out to mask some lingering childish hurts, as is seen in her confrontation with Lara Jean at the end of the novel. She reveals in this confrontation that she dropped Lara Jean as a friend because she saw Lara Jean making out with Peter back in the seventh grade; she seems to see this early transgression on Lara Jean’s part as a transgression equivalent to—and more than deserving of—her shaming of Lara Jean on social media some four years later.
It seems ironic, then, that Genevieve is the one to tell Lara Jean to “grow up” (332), rather than the other way around. As Lara Jean acknowledges, the encounter with Genevieve does make her feel a little older and wiser. This is not because what Genevieve has said to her is fair or right, but simply because she realizes that Genevieve is hurting, that the two of them were once close, and that she cannot write Genevieve off as a one-dimensional villain.
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By Jenny Han
