Heartstopper as a concept started off simple enough. Nick and Charlie meet. They flirt awkwardly like young teenagers do. They fret about their sexuality. Their grades. Their friends. Ultimately, they end up together, but that’s just the beginning of their story. Nick and Charlie were first introduced in Alice Oseman’s 2014 novel Solitaire. The couple were minor characters in that story, and Charlie’s sister Tori was the protagonist. But after writing Nick and Charlie, Oseman fell in love with them as characters and wanted to develop their story further.
From there, Oseman developed Heartstopper, a webcomic following Nick and Charlie’s story that Oseman both wrote and illustrated. The first volume of Heartstopper was published in 2019, and the most recent volume, volume 5, was published in December 2023. Originally, the fifth volume was meant to be the last volume in the series, but Oseman felt like they needed one more Heartstopper book to do Nick and Charlie justice, so we will be getting a final volume at some point soon. Needless to say, if you’re wanting to get into Heartstopper, there’s plenty to read to keep you occupied in the meantime. In addition to the graphic novels, there are two novellas: Nick and Charlie and This Winter.
But why read Heartstopper? Why now? This is a love story about British schoolboys, but it’s also a heartwarming coming-of-age story. When Nick and Charlie first meet, they are both inexperienced when it comes to love, and Nick is coming to terms with his sexuality. We also get into the stories of their friends at Truham Grammar School and Higgs Girls School. There’s Charlie’s best friend, Tao Xu, who is secretly in love with their other best friend, Elle Argent, who recently came out as transgender and transferred to the girl’s school. At Higgs, Elle makes new friends, most notably Tara Jones and her girlfriend Darcy Olsson. Although this is mostly Nick and Charlie’s story, each side character has their own fully developed storyline and their own time to shine. Their friend Aled Last even gets his own novel, Radio Silence.
Heartstopper deals with a lot of difficult topics. For instance, one of the main plot points is about a character who has an eating disorder. But what makes Heartstopper so special is the way the characters deal with the conflicts that come their way. From mental health issues to discussions of sexuality to dealing with going to different schools, this friend group truly loves each other and supports each other. If you ever get frustrated with romance stories where the main conflict all boils down to miscommunication, just know you don’t have to worry about that here. I’m a full-grown adult (sob) and I don’t communicate half as well as these teens do. Still, they do feel like real teens.
These books (and the series adaptations) just give me the warm fuzzies. Even in the toughest moments, reading Heartstopper feels like getting a warm hug. With all the stress and anxiety we have going on in our lives, and with all the terrible things going on in the world, who doesn’t need a hug right now?
