Pinky Swear

LoveReading Says

Driven by a drama-laden plot that pulsates with twists, Danielle Girard’s Pinky Swear plays out across two timelines centred on a trio of friends: “How to even explain the bizarre bond between teenage girls, the inseparability of me and Mara and Cate all those years ago”, shares Lexi, the principle narrator of this domestic thriller.

After an arresting prologue sets a heady high-stakes tone, we meet Lexi sixteen days before her baby is due to be born, thanks to her best friend Mara serving as a surrogate. All is apparently fine and dandy until Mara vanishes four days before her due date. Out of her mind with worry, Lexi embarks on what seems like a wild goose chase to find Mara and the soon-to-be-born child they’d nicknamed Baby Goose, and becomes painfully aware of how little she knew of Mara’s life through the sixteen years they’d been out of touch: “The iceberg of those gap years floated between us, but we skirted around it, leveraging the shared knowledge of our past. That trust.” 

As Lexi digs deeper and the revelations keep coming, she begins to wonder if she should ever have trusted Mara, with entries from the notebook she and her friends wrote secrets in through their teenage years revealing distressing past events. Exploring female friendship bonds and maternal longing, Pinky Swear is both suspenseful and shocking, with plenty of self-reflection layered between the all-out action and escalating danger.

Joanne Owen

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