Crush: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing and the Power of Their First Celebrity Crush

This charming book takes a look at first crushes—the ones that leave an “indelible image” and happen when our young selves believe “anything and everything [is] both possible and futile.” Jodi Picoult recalls running away at six years old, taking her Donny Osmond pillowcase; Nicola Yoon “kissed Michael Jackson every day for over a year.” Some crushes were painful and scary, awakening feelings of “forbidden” love and a respite from family life. Some weren’t about love at all but the ability to feel part of a “choir of lonely voices.” The contrast between crush and crushee is what makes some of the stories so appealing: the 12-year-old boy in Okinawa in 1955 who falls for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan, the “short Jewish guy” crushing on towering basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. One crush is on a cartoon character (Speed Racer) and two involve Little House on the Prairie. The authors do a remarkable job collecting different types of crushes while keeping the reminiscences short and sweet (one is just half a page). Carolyn Parkhurst’s zippy celebrity fantasy provides a pleasingly lighthearted conclusion to a book that balances heartbreak and relief, blind love and terror. Agent: Kimberly Perel, Wendy Sherman Associates (Apr.)