Heartstopper Vol 1-5 by Alice Oseman

Where to begin…. I was very late to Heartstopper. It was one of those book series that was so exaggerated up at the time that I did not want to dive into it and look like I was just following trends. How wrong I was!!

I first started reading the Heartstopper books after watching the Netflix show with my bf (I know! Never watch the adaption before reading the books!). like with most literature about coming out and finding love when you are in your teens, I thought Heartstopper would be that cliché of two people instantly falling in and everything going to plan but that was not the case. Heartstopper tackles the problem a lot of us LGBTQ+ people faced in our younger years and does it with effortless ease.

I am not going to lie, writing this review is difficult because Heartstopper means so much to me now. I read it at a time where I was still unsure about myself and who I was. It opened me up to a world where these characters were grappling with issues that were personal to me: being confused as to how I liked, having to keep secrets because I was unsure of how the world would see me if I was my true self and finding people that help build me up instead of tearing me down.

Instantly, I fell in love with Charlie’s character. He is nerdy and quiet but also someone who likes to see the good in people. He has his dark past, which is explored more in the later books, but it does not dominate his personality. Nick is the popular boy, sporty and outgoing. He is liked by everyone and is always there when you need him. When Charlie meets Nick in the first book, I could feel the sparks flying and it gave me a warm feeling to see how their friendship grew over the course of the story. Alice did an amazing job of showing how Charlie and Nick’s relationship was not a simple, straightforward “I Love You” type of thing from the start but they had a friendship that blossomed into something else. It was a welcome change from a lot of books out there where the main characters are motivated by lust instead of companionship.

Heartstopper is also a great example of an author giving the supporting characters more depth. Alice spends time fleshing out the side characters like Tao, Elle, Darcy, Tara and Aled. The time spent getting to know these characters helped elevate the stories to a new level because you could see how their lives intertwined with Charlie and Nick’s, and how their lives impact on each other. One character deserves her own special mention is the quiet but deadly assassin know as Tori, Charlie’s big sister. She is a one women army and I loved how defensive she is of both Charlie and Nick in the books but can still do her sisterly duty of constantly teasing them about being a couple. She is just amazing, and I literally howled with laughter when she kicks Nick’s brother David’s phone down the stairs when he is making homophobic comments to his mates about Charlie. Perfection.

One of my main takeaways from reading Heartstopper is that the characters’ sexual orientations are not the forefront of everything that happens. In some books that I have read, where the characters are queer, it is the driving factor in their personalities and dominates the whole story (like the running joke that you can tell when someone is a vegan because they will bring it up in every conversation). In Heartstopper, being gay or bi or even trans is not everything the characters are, it just a part of them (like in real life). It was breath of fresh air to read about people that had actual lives outside of being different because of who they love.