Home and belonging

Home and belonging are central to Lara Jean Covey’s imagined future: for years, she has treated the University of Virginia as the natural extension of home, a place close enough to preserve everyday family life and her relationship with Peter Kavinsky. UVA’s rejection exposes how much of her sense of belonging has depended on that plan. Meanwhile, the household itself changes as Trina Rothschild joins it, Margot Song returns to a home that has continued without her, and Kitty Song fears losing her place. The novel presents home not as an unchanging location but as a set of attachments, cultural practices, and relationships that must survive change.

UVA as an imagined home

Lara Jean has never seriously imagined going anywhere but UVA. Her guidance counselor, Mrs. Duvall, advises her not to apply early action so the admissions office can see her midyear grades; Lara Jean consequently applies to five schools rather than treating UVA as her sole option. UVA remains her first choice, however, in part because it is only fifteen minutes from home. She measures every alternative against its campus and proximity, imagining a familiar, almost storybook future in which distance from her family is barely perceptible.

That vision includes more than a nearby address. Lara Jean pictures coming home for Sunday dinner, doing laundry with Kitty on weeknights, and having Peter walk her to class; she even imagines studying at Clemons Library. The college plan gathers ordinary scenes into a promise that she can begin adult life without giving up home. It also entwines romance with place: Peter is part of the future she associates with UVA, even as the school’s importance rests on her own long-standing desire to remain close to family.

Margot’s perspective makes the sisters’ different ideas of belonging explicit. While Margot has always wanted the wider world, Lara Jean says she wants home, and UVA has come to stand for that preference. Margot does not simply prescribe the right college for her: she tells Lara Jean to trust her own judgment, while advising her to make her own friends and find people at UVA rather than relying on Peter’s lacrosse circle. She also encourages Lara Jean to join the Asian association, explaining that studying in another country left her wishing she had had an Asian-American group. Her advice connects belonging to chosen community and racial identity, not just geography or romance.

Rejection and the loss of a map

When Lara Jean reads the UVA decision, she first struggles to accept that it is real. The rejection, which does not even offer a place on the waitlist, collapses the future she had organized around attending college near home. Her imagined Sunday dinners, laundry nights with Kitty, Peter walking her to class, and late studying at Clemons Library all seem to disappear together. The news hurts not only because she has lost a school she wanted, but because she has treated it as a guarantee of where she belongs.

The next morning, the uncertainty persists: she does not know where she is going, and she has never before had to question where her place is. Her mental inventory of what she might miss makes the separation concrete through family moments rather than grand milestones. She worries about being absent when Kitty gets her first period. Margot had guided Lara Jean through her own first period, explaining tampons and cramps in a way that made growing up feel like entry into a shared community. Lara Jean imagines that Kitty may instead turn to Trina, who lives across the street. In that possibility, the sisters’ care is not erased, but the person available to offer it may change.

After the initial grief, Lara Jean tells Margot she still expects to go to UVA: she plans to attend William and Mary first, then transfer after freshman year if she earns good grades. Mrs. Duvall has told her that transferring would be a viable route. Margot challenges the haste of planning to leave a school Lara Jean has not yet attended, and asks whether the plan is because of Peter. The exchange makes clear that Lara Jean is trying to preserve the destination she associates with home before she has learned what another place might become. Margot’s challenge creates space to consider William and Mary as an experience in its own right, rather than merely a stop on the way back to UVA.

Home in a changing household

The family home also changes through the arrival of Trina. When Ravi visits, Lara Jean has prepared the guest room with towels, a robe, and slippers, assuming he will stay there. Margot instead says he will stay in her room. The unexpected announcement leaves Lara Jean, Kitty, and their father startled: the prepared room embodies one version of household expectations, while Margot’s choice reveals that the family is still renegotiating privacy and relationships.

When Margot returns from the airport for the first time since Trina moved in, she silently takes in the altered living room. Trina’s shoreline painting hangs on the mantel; embroidered pillows, a photograph of Trina and their father on the day he proposed, and a different armchair mark the room as shared territory. Lara Jean has moved her parents’ wedding portrait into her own room, and, seeing the living room through Margot’s eyes, recognizes that the new objects make it feel cluttered. Even the crowded shoe closet, where Margot pushes Trina’s cycling shoes aside to make room for her own, registers the practical friction of making space for another person.

Margot later names what these changes mean to her: returning feels like coming back to a whole new family she was not part of. Lara Jean wants to reassure her that nothing has changed, but recognizes that this would not be true. The family has continued in Margot’s absence, just as it will continue when Lara Jean leaves in the fall. Margot’s tears and admission that she misses their mother place grief alongside the ordinary evidence of change. Belonging cannot mean that the household remains exactly as it was; it means confronting the fact that its members can feel displaced even while they are loved.

Kitty voices a related fear when Lara Jean imagines that their father and Trina might have another child. With red blotches on her cheeks, Kitty says that a baby would put her in the middle and leave her as nothing. She is afraid of losing the distinction of being the youngest, the position she sees as hers. Her distress makes visible how family expansion can feel to a child like a threat to identity and attention, even when the change is still hypothetical. Home is a source of security, but its members do not automatically experience a growing family in the same way.

Culture as a form of belonging

Belonging in the Covey household is also tied to Korean heritage, though the sisters do not always agree on how that heritage should be expressed. In discussing wedding ideas, Peter wonders whether a proposed detail is an Asian tradition. Kitty corrects him: it is Thai, not Korean. Margot objects that Trina should not incorporate Asian culture into her wedding simply because the sisters are Asian, particularly since Trina is not Asian herself. Lara Jean sees another possibility: Trina has said she would like to acknowledge their mother, and her efforts may be intended to help the girls feel included. The disagreement turns cultural inclusion into a question of who gets to use a tradition, who it is meant to honor, and whether good intentions are enough.

Margot’s insistence that Korean food is the family’s strongest link to Korean culture brings that question into everyday life. When Kitty jokes about Trina not liking Korean food, Margot asks whether the family is simply going to stop eating it. She sees marriage to their father as bringing Trina into a whole family and cultural inheritance, not just a new household. Lara Jean replies that they will eat Korean food every day during the summer, grounding that continuity in an upcoming trip rather than in a demand that everyone share the same tastes.

The July trip to Korea is arranged by their grandmother and their father. The sisters will stay with a great-aunt in Seoul, take Korean language classes several times a week, and tour the country, including Jeju and Busan. Lara Jean is promised a Korean pastry-making class in English, connecting her interest in baking with an opportunity to learn through family and cultural experience. Margot imagines shopping together and watching Korean dramas without subtitles when they return. The trip makes cultural belonging something the sisters can practice and develop together, rather than an identity they must already know how to express perfectly.

Making belonging portable

Lara Jean’s conception of home begins as a specific destination: her family’s house, UVA nearby, and a future in which familiar routines continue almost uninterrupted. The rejection exposes the fragility of that map. She cannot preserve every anticipated Sunday dinner or be present for every change in Kitty’s life simply by wanting to stay close. At the same time, the book’s changing household offers a parallel lesson: home has already shifted through Trina’s arrival and Margot’s return, without ceasing to be the sisters’ family.

The sisters’ conversations suggest that belonging can be maintained through practices and relationships as well as proximity. Margot’s advice to seek friends and an Asian association recognizes that Lara Jean will need communities beyond Peter and her family. The trip to Korea offers shared language, food, travel, and pastry-making as ways to explore a cultural connection across generations. And Margot’s painful recognition that the family changed while she was away shows that returning home is not a simple restoration of the past. In this account, home matters precisely because it is loved—and because love does not stop life from changing.