Chasing Darkness, and The Rookie Club series. Her books have won the Barry Award, the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, and White Out was in the top 100 bestselling e-books of 2020. In addition, two of her titles have been optioned for screen.
Girard applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Pinky Swear, with the following results:
Page 69 shows a look into the girls’ shared high school journal. This is their private, confessional space and it’s intimate, messy and very teenager. The entry starts innocently, discussing a love of peanut butter on graham crackers and a mother who stopped buying them because she thought her daughter was “getting fat in like third grade.” It’s funny, painful, and telling all at once.Visit Danielle Girard's website.
The entry spirals into a strange reaction from her father and though the tone is flippant, there is something underneath about the girl’s reaction. Finally, the girl mentions a high school crush and calls herself his stalker for how much she watches him. Finally, the girl reassures the group that they can bury last weekend firmly in the past. They can keep this secret.
But that final line lands differently than the rest because secrets, of course, are never really buried.
Would page 69 give browsers a good idea of the whole work?
Yes, but maybe not in the way they would expect.
If a reader opened to page 69, they might initially think Pinky Swear is a novel about teenage girls, high school crushes, and family drama. They wouldn’t immediately see the suspense framework or the central crisis involving the surrogate’s disappearance.
But emotionally and in terms of the tone? The page is very representative of the novel.
At its core, Pinky Swear is about female friendship, about shared secrets, about the long tail of adolescent experiences into adulthood. The journal entries reveal how formative those early relationships are, and how the things we bury at sixteen have a way of resurfacing decades later.
So while page 69 might not scream “thriller” at first glance, it definitely reflects the heart of the book by hinting at the intensity of girlhood bonds, the complexity of family, and the dangerous illusion that the past can be sealed off.
In that sense, the test works surprisingly well.
I love that this page captures so many elements of the book. First, the authenticity of teenage voice. The humor (“barf”), the insecurity (“Does that make me a bitch?”), the melodrama, the rawness—it all feels immediate. While the girls are funny and sharp and self-aware, they are also deeply vulnerable and that emotional honesty is foundational to the novel.
Second, the page plants seeds of unease. The father’s strange behavior along with the abrupt emotional shifts and the casual mention of what happened “last weekend” as something they are determined to bury.
Third, the page underscores one of the novel’s central themes: how we misunderstand—or only partially understand—the people closest to us.
Finally, the shared journal itself is symbolic as it represents the intimacy and trust the girls have at sixteen.
So would page 69 give a browser the entire plot? No.
Would it give them the emotional essence of the book? Absolutely because it shows the origin story of a friendship and it hints at fracture lines in families. This page also introduces secrecy as both glue and fault line and it ends with the dangerous optimism of youth: We can keep this secret.
Anyone who reads that line and feels a prickle of dread is already in the right book.
Writers Read: Danielle Girard (August 2018).
My Book, The Movie: Expose.
The Page 69 Test: Expose.
The Page 69 Test: White Out.
Q&A with Danielle Girard.
Writers Read: Danielle Girard.
--Marshal Zeringue
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