Review by Frank Plowright
How soon into a relationship is it okay to tell someone you love them? It’s a question playing on Charlie Spring’s mind around four months after he got together with Nick Nelson. Before everyone heads away on holiday there’s a day at the beach. Is then the right time?
Having picked up on the clues during Volume 3, Nick also has something he wants to bring up, and that takes precedence. Alice Oseman’s emotional plotting is extraordinarily astute, and she provides Heartstopper with the poise and well foreshadowed surprises of a Richard Curtis film drama. The moments drop at exactly the right time, but subtle clues lead to them, and Oseman’s also introduced the right balance of characters to cover most situations. Because the cast has grown so much, Oseman now occasionally moves the spotlight away from Charlie and Nick, gradually filling in how even those who seem entirely secure have concerns. One matter addressed is how dismissive adults can be of problems experienced by teenagers, not taking the upset seriously just because those suffering are young. Also admirable is that no easy answers are supplied to real world issues. Support, advice and counselling are the way forward, and there’s no waving of the magical wand.
As she’s both writer and artist, Oseman tells much through posture and expression, and her attention to detail is exemplified by Nick’s phone. He drops it at one point, and thereafter when it’s seen, it’s with a pattern of hairline cracks.
Three previous bulky volumes have covered a period of a few months, but time fair zips by in Volume 4. The end of the school term begun in Volume 1 makes way for the summer holidays, then the start of the new term, after which there’s the surprise of a four month jump to a new year. That, though is just the appetiser to the shocks that follow. Having committed to dealing with Charlie’s mental health issues, Oseman follows through, and what’s generally been a cheery series takes a very dark turn. There’s a feeling that trauma was the issue Oseman wanted to reach all along, and the stumbling first steps of a relationship were just the means of arriving.
Whether or not that’s the case, Volume 4 ends with a family dinner that would be torture to be part of, but hits all the right spots when reading.
Oseman finishes off with the usual extras, including a nice sequence of firsts for two teachers featured in the main story. Having maintained a schedule of one Heartstopper book a year from 2018, the series was to end with Volume 5, but that didn’t appear in 2022, and seemed to have bypassed 2023 also before Oseman surprised everyone by publishing just before Christmas.
