58 pages • 1 hour read
Jenny HanAlways and Forever, Lara Jean
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 29-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 29 Summary
Lara Jean reflects on her last day of school as a senior. Peter wants to skip classes, but she is excited to say goodbye to her teachers. Peter has forgotten Lara Jean’s yearbook again, which upsets her because she had wanted to get more signatures. She reasons that she could still pass it around at graduation. The day is not designed to be taxing; Lara Jean has brought cookies with her, and her final grades are all good. While Lara Jean is overcome by nostalgia cleaning out her locker, Lucas is practical when he says he probably won’t see any of his fellow classmates ever again once he moves to New York. Lara Jean reminds him about Beach Week. After school, Lara Jean goes home with Peter, who has the home to himself that afternoon. He has new bedding that he shamelessly admits his mom put together for him. She thinks he looks beautiful in the afternoon light, and they snuggle. Soon they are kissing and making out, something Peter points out they only do at his house, and Lara Jean admits is because her room reminds her of being a little girl.
The phone rings downstairs, and while Peter is gone answering it, Lara Jean sees her yearbook and opens it to find he hasn’t written her a note. Lara Jean has to go home, but she gets back in bed with him for a few minutes. She asks him about the yearbook, and he says he can’t find it—so she calls him out on the lie, admitting she saw that he hadn’t written anything. He says he keeps trying but freezing up, and she reminds him to just write what’s in his heart. Peter tells her he went to his father’s house for dinner because Owen wanted him to, but it made him feel like an outsider. He compares the feeling to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, when Charlie doesn’t have enough money to go into the chocolate shop. By comparison, Peter’s dad is being a better father now than when Peter was a boy.
Chapter 30 Summary
After grabbing “basics” like chips and salsa, soda, and ice cream, Peter drops Lara Jean at her house to get ready for Margot’s arrival. She comes in with her father after he’s finished work, and right away notices all the changes Trina has made. Trina has a lot of shoes also, making it difficult for Margot’s to fit in the closet. While dinner is being made, Margot decides to clear her old shoes out. She complains about dog fur, and Lara Jean points her to the lint roller. That night, Lara Jean overhears Trina confronting Margot with her birth control, which had been out on the sink. She believes she’s doing Margot a favor, and Margot retorts that she doesn’t keep secrets from her father.
Peter comes over the day before graduation and suggests they light lanterns for the wedding and send them into the sky. Kitty says it is a Thai tradition; Margot says it doesn’t need to be part of the wedding because “Trina isn’t even Asian […] It doesn’t have anything to do with her” (408). Margot becomes negative when Lara Jean considers ways to incorporate their birth mother’s spirit into the ceremony. After she leaves, Lara Jean and Peter discuss how difficult Margot can be to win over.
Later in the day, once Peter is gone, Lara Jean hears Margot and Trina arguing over Margot leaving hair in the tub drain. Margot comes downstairs to complain to Lara Jean about Trina’s dog’s hair some more, and Trina overhears. She has a retort ready; Margot is amazed she is not backing down. When Lara Jean and Margot get back from the mall, Kitty has vacuumed everything. At dinner, Trina and Margot act civilly, which Lara Jean finds even more disconcerting.
Chapter 31 Summary
On graduation day, Lara Jean wakes up to the sounds of her family getting ready and thinks about how she’ll miss them when she’s gone. Margot gives her a kit full of things designed to prepare her for college, Kitty gives her a handmade card, and Trina gives her a tea set that belonged to her own mother. Her gift from her father is a trip to Korea that summer with her sisters; while he and Trina are on their honeymoon, they will go visit their grandmother, stay in Seoul, take language classes, and see the country for the month of July. They’ve even set up pastry classes for Lara Jean. The other two girls are overjoyed, so Lara Jean keeps a smile on her face; secretly, she is upset she’ll be spending the summer apart from Peter.
The girls all wear white at graduation; Lara Jean is wearing the same dress Margot did two years ago. Kitty says she’ll want to wear her own clothes. Lara Jean misses her mother and wishes she could be there. She has spotted her own family in the crowd due to Trina’s enormous hat, but she can’t see Peter’s. The principal pronounces her name wrong, and she forgets to blow a kiss while she’s on the stage, but she’s still happy. Peter looks upset, and he tells her that his father was caught up with an emergency and didn’t show up to his graduation. Then, her family surrounds her, and he disappears to find his own family.
They go to a Japanese restaurant and eat while Trina chats to their grandma. Her grandma tells them all about Korea. She also tells Kitty never to get plastic surgery on her nose because she has a “lucky nose”. Lara Jean and her father ride home together, and her father tells her that her mother would have been proud of her. They talk about her for a while, and her plans for the future. They make a stop for photo paper on the way home so that Lara Jean can include a photo of her and Peter from graduation on the last page of the scrapbook she’s put together for him.
Chapter 32 Summary
After dinner, Peter comes over; Lara Jean pries him to talk about his father, but he dodges it. She apologizes for making him mad, but he says it’s just his dad’s fault. She finally tells him about meeting his dad at his lacrosse game, and it’s clear this makes him even more upset, but he asks her to please drop the subject. Instead, Lara Jean pulls out her gift for Peter—the scrapbook. He is genuinely enjoying it until she calls it “something to remember us by,” at which point he snaps the book shut and barks a terse “Thanks,” claiming he’ll look at the rest later (433). Peter says he’s fine but needs to leave to pack for Beach Week.
After he leaves, Margot helps Lara Jean pack while she worries about Peter. Lara Jean asks Margot what the little things she missed about home were when she first left for college. She talks about food, and they go downstairs to make a lemon cake. Lara Jean asks Margot questions about sex and tells Margot she and Peter still haven’t done it. Margot approaches the conversation casually, but Lara Jean wants sex with Peter to “always be a sacred thing,” different from anyone else (438). She tells Margot about the kit their dad made for her, and Margot tells her to bring it to Beach Week, just in case. That night, she packs her condoms and her prettiest bra and undies.
Chapters 29-32 Analysis
Lara Jean’s graduation brings Margot back to the States and back into confrontation with Trina, who has moved into the house now. They argue over boundaries and space, with Margot again betraying a sensitivity toward not fitting into the new home her family has configured without her. Both women have Kitty’s best interest in mind, and they strike up a kind of silent truce to keep her from worrying after she vacuums the whole house. We see that while the women are at odds, they are able to come together in their mutual love for Kitty, the youngest Covey sister. They both have had the chance to act as mother figures in her life; now, they need to learn to work together for her.
Lara Jean graduates, and gives her scrapbook to Peter. His interest diminishes when she refers to it as a book of memories; here, the reader might pick up on Peter’s anxieties. He’s unable to express himself in her yearbook and clams up when given the scrapbook. The reader realizes before Lara Jean does that something is bothering him, something related to his future, with Lara Jean headed to UNC and himself to UVA.
At graduation, there is also the element of the missing father. Whereas Lara Jean misses her mother and actively wishes she could be there, she knows it is impossible because her mother has died. Peter’s father had agreed to be there and is not; Peter describes the feeling by comparing himself to Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His father has made a new family and left him behind, peering in through the window. He feels a sense of longing for this lost childhood filled with memories of his father, but he doesn’t open up fully with Lara Jean. She had a full childhood with her mother before her mother got sick, and she has never had to wonder why she and her full siblings weren’t enough for her parent. In this way, Peter’s father does not receive redemption; some parents are just not good to their children and find themselves incapable of change.
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