Aimee reviews~ Crushing by Sophie Burrows

This debut graphic novel started it’s life as a shorter comic in 2016, but grew into the text I hold in my hands today during the pandemic. At it’s heart, this is a comic about connection and isolation, a theme many of us will have mused upon over the last few years.

Following the two nameless protagonists, Crushing is a wordless love story told in a dynamic, lively illustrative duotone style. I must admit, it was the confident and expressive illustrations that initially drew me to the tale.

While researching the creator, I read that the illustrations were initially born from a drawing exercise: the artist wanted to practise drawing busy, crowded scenes, with lots of people and observing the way they interact. In this regard, the novel is a triumph. Burrows expertly uses perspective, characterisation, and colour to form a vibrant representation of city life. On one page, the protagonists meet eyes across a busy tube carriage. The romance of it is almost unbearable for my sentimental heart. The love interest practically glows with that coup de foudre, love at first sight, thrill and panic from behind a grumpy commuter, a tangle of arms holding onto railings, and bodies crammed in like sardines. It’s a truly beautiful moment.

The story continues, and the lovers continually cross paths without meeting, moments and meters apart, but connected with not the cliched line of red thread, but with Burrows’ red coloured pencil.

One scene stands out, where the figures stand in different aisles of the same supermarket, each existing in their regular, ordinary routines but meters away from each other. The grey products, lined up perfectly, give me that familiar numb feeling one gets in the supermarket – overwhelmed by choice and overstimulated by it all – but before the love-struck protagonists, they glow red from the light emitting from their bodies. It is a moment of romanticising the every day, and our places within it. As a reader, you will the protagonists to turn around, go along the adjacent aisle, and finally, finally, say hello.

At the end of the text, the writer talks a little about the inspiration behind this story of missed connection columns (Dear the brunette on the 9:05 train the Liverpool Street… you know the kind.) and the isolation experienced in the pandemic, and also touches on mental health and crisis organisations, which is a lovely touch for such a sensitively portrayed tale.

This is a fundamentally gentle, touching, and intimate presentation of love at first sight, our need for connection, and our anxieties of allowing ourselves to be seen. At it’s heart, this text is about the quietness of intimacy in an overwhelmingly loud world. In a time where we are all still processing the significant period of isolation and loneliness of the pandemic, this graphic novel is a delightfully comforting and reassuring text. How could a reader not be moved?