Vulture on Crush: "Books about perimenopausal women seeking romance outside their marriages continue to be a micro-trend in the publishing world. 2023 delivered Molly Roden Winter’s buzzy memoir More: A Memoir of Open Marriage and Miranda July’s All Fours, a novel about an artist’s unexpected sexual awakening. Now there’s Crush, which reads almost like a cross between the two. The first novel from Ada Calhoun — her nonfiction books include Also a Poet and Why We Can’t Sleep — is written from the perspective of a married Brooklyn writer who decides to explore polyamory only to fall hard for David, a former crush who quickly becomes her current one. The potential lovers communicate through books and literary references. “One day David and I began — because this was the kind of thing that happened — sending each other emails in the style of a thousand-year-old Japanese court diary, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon,” she writes. I mean: Who among us hasn’t done this? But Calhoun has a gift for explaining complicated emotions with concise, carefully chosen prose. If you’re a woman of a certain age whose hot flashes have reignited other fires within, you will read and feel recognized. —Jen Chaney"