Story for the Week
I really like notebooks. In fact, I might have a bit of a notebook obsession. Don’t ask me why. I like having notebooks and buying cute or fun notebooks. I just don’t use the cute and fun notebooks outside of work. 🤷🏼♀️
For the most part, I limit my use to a refillable notebook. It’s the perfect size to sit on my desk in front of my monitor so I can take notes during meetings. As I get to the end of a refill, I keep the full one for a period of time in case I have to look back at any previous notes.
I also don’t use the lines in my notebooks. I may start on a line, but more often than not, I scribble over several lines, usually at very odd angles. And when I’m flipping back looking for something, I remember its basic position on a page and whether it was on the lefthand page or the righthand page. Please don’t ask me to explain. I’m sure someone who studies how the brain works could explain it, but I certainly can’t. It is just how I am.
Before you ask, I have, in fact, tried to go paperless for note-taking. While I use a multitude of apps and programs to stay organized personally, I have succeeded only once at online note-taking in the late 1990s. I had a successful 10-12 years, but attempts since 2010 have been an epic failure.
I blame FranklinCovey. They spoiled all other organizer apps for me.
Some of you are probably old enough to remember Franklin Planner and Steven R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which turned into the Covey Leadership Center. If you are that old, yes, I mean the FranklinCovey created by a merger of the two organizations.
Before electronic handheld devices existed, I lived and died by my Franklin Day Planner. It held my calendar, my contacts, my grocery lists, my to-do lists. My entire life existed in that planner. I started with a small one that would fit in my purse. When I began using it for taking notes for work, I invested in the 8.5×11 ring-bound planner. It allotted two pages per day, and it went with me everywhere.
With the introduction of the PalmPilot in the 1990s, I converted my contacts and calendar to electronic, but I held on to my Franklin Planner. The PalmPilot didn’t really support note-taking, and I liked having everything in one place in the planner. And then FranklinCovey with Complete XRM introduced what I considered the perfect program—PlanPlus. That singular program eliminated my large Franklin Planner completely.
PlanPlus integrated my calendar, my contacts, my lists, my notes, and it synced with my PalmPilot and then with my Blackberry. In those days, we purchased stand-alone programs on CDs, so I installed it on my work laptop, and it synced with my work contact list and calendar as well.
But then I started a job with a company that didn’t allow us to install our own software. I could still use PlanPlus on my personal computer, but it kind of defeated the purpose because the idea was to have everything in one place. While I appreciate being able to sync my calendar and contacts to any electronic device since that became a thing, without PlanPlus, I went back to paper for note-taking.
I use Google for my personal e-mail, calendar, and contacts. My job requires Microsoft. I love Google Keep for personal checklists, and I recently adopted Microsoft Planner for my work to-do list. All of those are accessible on my iPhone, but none of them are effective for daily note-taking.
I have tried Microsoft’s OneNote multiple times, and while I use it for some specific work meetings, I have not been able to stick with it for daily notes. In fairness, the volume and variety of meetings I have now are exponentially larger than when I used PlanPlus and just took notes by day. My job is very different. I touch more areas now. And even as I write this, I think to myself that maybe I could try again. Maybe if I spend time organizing a tab for each standing meeting with a page for each date…maybe it will work.
But for now I am still using paper notebooks…and I’m still collecting notebooks that I don’t use or need. At this very moment, my desk houses:
- A partially used notebook I received on a wellness retreat, which I used on the retreat and haven’t touched since
- A notebook that I received as a gift that says “You Make a Difference”
- A Happy Planner Wellness Edition that I used for about a week (it’s undated, so when I decide to try it again, I can 🤣)
- Six notebooks from the Harry Potter Magic at Play experience when it was in Chicago
- A Disney Cruise Line notebook
- Five color-coded notebooks that I was going to use for each of five different projects before I moved to a new team
- Two meal planning notebooks (again, 🤣)
- A notebook I bought when we saw Mamma Mia that says “I have a dream…”
- A notebook Corinne bought for me during her semester abroad that looks like a Highland cow (or “coo” as they say)
I purchased the most recent notebook for myself just before Christmas…because I needed another notebook 🙄. Okay, okay, while shopping for Christmas gifts for Corinne’s friend Jakub, I saw this notebook and knew he and Corinne would both love it. And I decided to get one for myself as well.
Despite the fact that I am very Polish, I had never heard the Polish proverb “not my circus, not my monkeys.” Corinne and Jakub, however, use that phrase a lot when they talk about drama they don’t need (or want) to be involved in. It rubbed off, and I started using it myself.
So when I saw a notebook that says “turns out these are my monkeys and this is my circus”…. I mean, I couldn’t not buy it…times three. 🫣
And despite the fact that in my nearly 60 years on the planet as a very Polish person who had never heard the Polish proverb until the last year or so, apparently the author of the book below has heard it. Or maybe it’s just become pretty popular with the younger generations. One of the characters talks about her husband thinking something is not his problem. And she thinks to herself, “Not my circus, not my monkeys, as Cate used to say. How I wish I could call Cate.”
It’s a great phrase…and I love my new notebook…even though it’s probably going to sit unused on my desk for a very long time. 😉
Book Review
⭐⭐½
2.5 Stars for Pinky Swear by Danielle Girard
288 pages
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Atria/Emily Bestler Books.
Publisher’s Description
Lexi thought she knew everything about Mara Vannatta. Best friends since middle school, they drifted apart after a tragedy derailed their senior year. But when Mara shows up on Lexi’s doorstep sixteen years later fleeing an abusive husband, Lexi takes her in without question. Lexi’s own marriage has been strained by her desire to have a baby, and when Mara offers to become her surrogate, their friendship feels stronger than ever.
But four days before the due date, Mara disappears.
Lexi is shocked but certain there must be something wrong—Mara would never willingly leave with her unborn child. Or would she? As she embarks on a perilous cross-country hunt for the truth, Lexi is forced to reconsider a friendship she thought she knew—and what really happened that terrible night their senior year. How many secrets lie in their shared past, waiting to be uncovered? And just how far will Lexi go to bring her child safely home?
************
Main Characters:
- Alexandra (Lexi) McNeil – mid-30s, separated from her husband Henry, stepmom to Nolan and Kyle, worked as a legal secretary when she and Henry met, has fertility issues, grew up in Cleveland
- Mara Vannatta – mid-30s, she and Lexi made up a trio of best friends with Cate in high school, have been out of touch since graduation, showed up at Lexi’s door in Denver 15 months ago after leaving an abusive husband, surrogate for Lexi using a sperm donor
- Henry – late 40s, 14 years older than Lexi, Nolan and Kyle were eight and ten when he and Lexi met more than ten years ago, moved out of their house six months ago but still pays all the bills, didn’t want more children, works in engineering
Trigger warning: infertility, sexual assault
I wanted to like this book. The premise held so much promise. After multiple rounds of IVF and several miscarriages, Lexi desperately wants a child of her own. As much as she loves being a stepmom to Henry’s grown sons, it hasn’t lessened her desire to have her own baby. Enter Mara, one of Lexi’s best friends through middle school and high school, who agrees to be a surrogate. But four days before the baby’s due date, Mara disappears.
The story covers dual timelines—the present day with Lexi searching desperately for Mara before the baby is born and Lexi and Mara’s high school friendship with Cate leading up to Cate’s tragic death just before graduation. Cate’s death seems to be the impetus for why Lexi and Mara went their separate ways and lost touch. But the author never explains how Mara happened to find Lexi in Denver when she ran away from Philadelphia.
I won’t give away any of the major plot points yet (see spoilers below). I’ll talk about the Lexi-Mara-Cate timeline first. The three girls have notebooks they swap back and forth as a journal of sorts. At some point, pages get ripped out, which creates tension between the trio. Two of the girls are keeping a secret; the third girl is suspicious.
Honestly, the whole idea of these notebooks being swapped back and forth, hiding them from teachers by labeling them with that year’s science course, seems too childish by their senior year. “Mara had slid it into her backpack as they packed up, skipping Lexi even though it always went to her Monday then to Cate Wednesday, and Mara on Friday—Mara’s parents were the least likely to snoop and find it so it spent weekends there.” These girls are not 13. Exchanging notebooks and writing “about who they might kiss and in what order. Whether they would let a boy go to second base,” does not sound like 17-year-olds.
I found most of the flashbacks to high school pretty unnecessary. The girls all had different relationships with their parents, different sibling mixes. The author uses these to explain the dynamic between the three that makes their friendship work. But the secret creates tension and results in Lexi and Mara losing touch after high school. The notebook entries definitely don’t add anything for me though. And the key entry actually confuses everything (again, see below for spoilers).
In the present day, while there are lots of mentions of Henry still paying the bills and getting in touch with Lexi, we don’t really ever get the back story of him moving out of the house. He clearly still loves Lexi and stays involved, but it feels like the only reason he had to be moved out of the house was so that Mara could disappear. Not a great setup for that particular plot point.
The book also feels really long, but at less than 300 pages, it should be a pretty quick read. It should be a page-turner at that length. It isn’t…at all.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that Lexi and Mara refer to the unborn baby as Goose. They know she’s a girl. Goose? Really? 🙄
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
So spoilers….
When the girls are in high school, Mara’s older brother Caleb rapes Cate. Cate writes the details in the notebook and then tears the pages out. Cate and Mara agree never to tell Lexi, but Cate knows that Lexi suspects they have a secret and even makes a comment that she should be a detective. (I’m sure this is just to set up Lexi’s “investigative skills” in the present day.)
What is super confusing is that before the author lays out the notebook entry, Cate has the notebook, opens it looking back at what she wrote before they left for a party. Before revealing the last entry to the readers, it says: “Sickening now. She turns the page, filled with dread,” which gave me the impression that Cate was preparing to read the notebook entry.
Halfway through the entry, Cate runs her finger over the stain of a tear. The notebook entry concludes with “I thought writing it down would help release the pressure of it. But it doesn’t help. Nothing will help. I know one thing for sure. No one can know. You have to destroy these pages. Now.” And then Cate tears out the pages and thinks they will never speak of it again. “Not even to Lexi.”
I assumed all along that Cate is reading what Mara wrote because the boy’s name never comes up. Cate and Mara never talk about what happened or to whom. It comes up that Cate doesn’t like keeping the secret from Lexi because she knows Lexi is suspicious. Later in the story, in the present day, we learn that the surrogacy is Mara’s second pregnancy. I think the author fully intends for us to believe that Mara was raped, got pregnant, and maybe she killed Cate to keep her quiet (she didn’t).
In the present day, Lexi calls the police in Denver about Mara’s disappearance, but she keeps some facts to herself. Who knows why. When she finds a bus schedule to Philadelphia behind a printer, she doesn’t call the police. She gets on a flight to Philadelphia to look for Mara herself. And even though she finds out that Mara used to run with some sketchy types, she does not take any precautions and gets herself in trouble over and over again.
She finds a woman Mara stayed with for a while, and the woman gives Lexi a letter with a key in it that Mara left with her before she left Philadelphia. This woman doesn’t know Lexi, Mara didn’t mention that she was going to find Lexi as far as we’re aware. Yet Lexi talks multiple times about trying to figure out why Mara left the letter and the key for her. So we’re supposed to believe that a year and a half ago Mara would know that Lexi was going to have to go to Philadelphia looking for her? And that Lexi would find this woman so that she could give Lexi the letter with the key?
On top of that, a (dirty) detective Mara used to be involved with is the one looking for her. This is someone who has known Mara recently, but somehow Lexi, who Mara lied to about her past, is the one who eventually finds her. After the detective shot her…and she’s on the verge of giving birth…and she left a blood trail…but Lexi finds her.
Oh…and then Lexi blocks the door to the office Mara is hiding in with a filing cabinet, and while the detective is trying to break down the door, Lexi performs a C-section with a switchblade she took from men who attacked her days before. A C-section she thinks she knows how to perform because she has spent months watching YouTube videos leading up to the baby’s due date.
The more I read, the more implausible the whole story became. Based on other reviews, this author clearly has a solid fan base, but I am definitely not one of them.
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