Cross My Heart and Never Lie

12-year-old Tuva is looking forward to seeing her friends Bao and Linnéa after the summer. But Linnéa doesn’t want to play in the woods at lunch break any more – she has a boyfriend now. Bao is annoyed and hurt, while Tuva doesn’t know what to think.

Suddenly, it seems her friendship group has split in two. Linnéa and the girls who fall in love (and wear make up), and Bao and the girls who are still exactly the same as before. Tuva is torn between her friends, not wanting to hurt either… and then she meets new girl Mariam. Maybe Tuva is a girl who falls in love after all? 

This charming graphic novel perfectly captures the difficult emotions of reaching milestones at a different rate to your friends. Tuva both wants everything to be as it was, and to grow up, all at the same time. She confides everything to her diary in a variety of styles: a handwritten font with doodles, full page illustrations and comic strip-style squares with speech bubbles.

Nora Dåsnes, a Norwegian author-illustrator, conveys emotion and tension brilliantly in the pictures. All ‘love content’ is minimal and innocent – Tuva simply decides that she likes a girl, while Linnéa and Martin only text.