Graphic novel, Netflick smash – Heartstoppers
Heartstoppers – the blurb
Charlie and Nick are at the same school, but they’ve never met … until one day when they’re made to sit together. They quickly become friends, and soon Charlie is falling hard for Nick, even though he doesn’t think he has a chance.
But love works in surprising ways, and Nick is more interested in Charlie than either of them realised.
By Alice Oseman, winner of the YA Book Prize, Heartstopper is about love, friendship, loyalty and mental illness. It encompasses all the small moments of Nick and Charlie’s lives that together make up something larger, which speaks to all of us.
Give me half an hour
I don’t know how I missed that Heartstoppers was a graphic novel. I’ve seen the cover and the others that follow it (soon to be 5) so many times. My daughter bought it on holiday and having nothing else to hand to read one day I picked it up, turned to the first page and raised an eyebrow. It’s a comic! Sorry, I’m aware I’ve greatly insulted a lot of people by that sentence. It’s actually a graphic novel, very beautifully drawn by Oseman but for some reason I had in my mind it was a an actual novel. Not put off at all I continued to page 2 and polished the whole lot in half an hour. It’s a lovely, gentle account of Nick and Charlie and their budding romance. It’s very modern, not necessarily in content but in style. I can certainly see the appeal to teens put off by Steinbeck and Dickens.
To be honest I’m not sure whether I would want to pay the £11 my daughter paid for a book that only takes 30 minutes to read but then I’m not one to go back and re-read and I’m also unlikely to pay more than £50 for a pair of jeans so take of that what you will. As it happens my daughter has ordered the next two from the library but I wouldn’t have put it past her to have bought them as they are beautiful additions to the bookshelves of any teen.
