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Jenny Han’s 2014 young adult novel To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before spent 40 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list (that’s right, long enough for people to grow entire humans) and has been translated into 30 languages. Along with its two sequels, P.S. I Still Love You and Always and Forever, Lara Jean, it helped cement Han’s reputation as a big-hitting writer of American YA. Fast forward four years and a movie deal has brought her as close to celebrity status as most YA authors get. The glamourous write-up of her vintage-styled Brooklyn apartment for Refinery29 in 2016 must seem now like merely the first ripple in a tidal wave of press attention, with everyone from Vulture to Vanity Fair eager for the inside story on the latest addition to Netflix’s rom-com renaissance.

But let’s take it back to the book for a minute: before the flashing lightbulbs, the red carpet premieres, or the film’s most gif-able moments. To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before is the story of Lara Jean Song, a teenager who keeps the love letters she’s written to help her get over her crushes in a secret hatbox – and what happens when someone else finds and sends them. Lara Jean must attempt to navigate the humiliation, and surprising results, of her heart being laid bare. Recipients of the letters include middle school friend turned lacrosse jock Peter K, and, most catastrophically of all, the boy-next-door she thinks she still might be in love with, her older sister Margot’s boyfriend, Josh.

The book touches on Lara Jean’s biracial Korean-American heritage and explores her changing relationships with sisters Margot, who’s off to college in Scotland, and Kitty, the energetic baby of the family. Han’s prose, by turns cutesy and leisurely, is of that broad All-American style familiar to fans of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and Stephanie Perkins’ Anna and the French Kiss.

Netflix’s To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before opens with Lara Jean’s doctor father (My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Sex and the City’s John Corbett, caught somewhere between phoning it in and playing a really believable well-meaning widower dad) trying to make Korean food as part of his attempts to help his daughters stay in touch with their late mother’s culture. If anything, the film is even more saccharine-sweet than the novel it is based on. The cumulative effect of director Susan Johnson’s Wes Anderson-style framing and Lara Jean’s carefully-curated aesthetic – probably best described as combining the knee-socks and pleated skirts of Clueless with the vintage colour-scheme of a 1960s sweetshop – is to create a film that feels like candyfloss: sugary, indulgent, and undoubtedly going to be a nostalgic feature in some youngsters’ memories.

But it is also tender, and feel-good, and fun. Johnson’s conscious habit of placing actors right in the middle of shots invites the audience to step into their shoes. Lana Condor’s Lara Jean behaves like a teenage girl, someone for whom relationship drama really does feel world-shaking. Fresh off ensemble comedy-drama The Fosters, Noah Centineo puts in a terrific performance as Peter Kavinsky, turning the loud, popular guy into a thoughtful, revealing love interest right down to the smallest gestures.

The adaptation of a book to a film is a game of give-and-take even in a relatively faithful adaptation like this one. Some of the relationship-building scenes between Lara Jean and Peter K from the book, such as a baking sequence and a trip to an antique store, are gone. In its place is an emotive scene between Lara and her father in the diner which has become something of a family haunt. There are some missteps; the actress playing Margot (Janel Parrish) is almost 30 despite her character having just graduated high school. They also never really explain what Peter sees in sometime-ex Genevieve (Emilija Baranac), who, as far as I can tell, is never anything but high school-level cruel to everyone else in the movie.

The title of this series is ‘read the book first’, but we might let you away with reading the book second in this case. Not because one or the other is better, but because whatever order you experience this story in, the follow-up will offer you something more, whether it’s an on-screen version of your favourite moments or extra fictional detail. It recently emerged that the makers of Crazy Rich Asians turned down seven-figure upfront payouts to push for a risky but historic cinematic release, which means that the team behind To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before followed the money – but fans will probably follow To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before anyway. It certainly puts the rom in teen rom-com. What’s more, it puts a young Asian-American at the heart of a well-written, highly enjoyable romantic comedy.