Breakaway Books

Authored by Adele Calhoun; Published February 2025; Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

For a novel centered on polyamory, Crush was a little more traditional than I expected. In fact, it defied many of my expectations and managed to deliver a reasonably happy love story.

In Crush, the narrator is a successful and happy woman—married, with a child and a fulsome career, as well as a community of friends and neighbors. But her husband, Paul, pushes her to explore physical intimacy with other men as a way of increasing her sex appeal for him, and as soon as the narrator starts on her journey, she discovers that she feels more alive than she has in years. She reconnects with David, a college acquaintance, and falls deeply in love, sparking heated arguments with her husband, who doesn’t believe this is what he signed up for. David seems like her soulmate… but should that trump her marriage to her husband?

I admit, I was surprised by the cheery tone of this novel. It’s meant to explore the boundaries of traditional relationships—kind of—so I expected more drama, more cringeworthy moments, but somehow, the narrator seems to float through. For much of the novel, she is carried through on the dream-like positive feelings that most of us have experienced through crushes. Pondering divorce, as weighty as it is, still felt, at times, like more of a philosophical question than a massive decision that would change her life. Of course, the novel was not all happiness, and the narrator does get stuck in the mire of anxiety, particularly when it comes to the effect of divorce on her son. But the lightness, while it made the novel relatively easy to get through, felt discordant with the subject matter. Perhaps this is more about the perspective I brought to the book, after reading so many other novels that treated infidelity and divorce as serious, even tragic, topics. The narrator of Crush was just too full of light and love for that.

Perhaps what saddened me the most in this story is how long the narrator had gone without having her desires truly fulfilled. It becomes clear quickly that as happy as she was in her marriage, she was lit up with life as soon as she starts exploring physical affection that had previously been denied to her in her marriage. She had simply gone without, for decades. Her husband does not come off well—petulant, hypocritical, and vindictive—and it did seem like some sort of cosmic justice that he pushed her toward the behavior that ultimately dissolved their marriage. Of course, the narrator’s relationship with David drove me nuts a different way, bearing such a close resemblance to the embodiment of the concept of soul mates, which I simply do not believe in.

Crush is a fascinating example of a modern-day romance: traditional rules be damned, but perhaps traditional desires are exactly the same? If you have been buoyed by crushes your whole life, you might like this one.