Cross My Heart and Hope to Die

Nora Dåsnes

Nominated for the 2022 International Angoulême Comics Festival Awards (France)

Nominated for the Max und Moritz Preis 2022 (Germany)

Awarded “GOLD Best Illustrations Children’s Books 2021” and “Diploma Graphic Novels 2021” The Year’s Most Beautiful Books (the Norwegian Designer’s Guild’s Visual Prize)

Awarded the 2020 Ministry of Culture Graphic Novel Prize

Awarded the 2020 Pondus Prize

Nominated for the 2021 Best Graphic Novel

Nominated for the 2021/2022 Avid Reader Award “Bokslukerprisen”

Nominated for the 2021 Children’s Book Prize (Bergen Library)

A graphic novel with LGBT topic for age 9 and up.

How do you know that you’re in love?

Nothing is as it used to be when Tuva and her friends start seventh grade. While one of them now has a boyfriend and another hates everything about falling in love and having boyfriends, Tuva finds it hard to choose side. Besides, Tuva plans to fall in love herself. Then Miriam shows up. Can you fall in love with a girl and at the same time like the most popular boyband.

A heartwarming graphic novel about friendship, falling in love for the first time and figuring out what is cool when you start seventh grade.

Film with Nora Dåsnes talking about Cross My Heart and Hope to Die here.

Reviews

Nora Dåsnes’ debut hits right in your heart!
Una Gjerde, Empirix.no

A debut of an extraordinary high standard, among others through Dåsnes’ grip of the details. In Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, so much can depend on a small glance, minimal facial expressions, and a father’s raised eyebrows. And that’s pretty big.
From the jury’s statement, the 2020 Ministry of Culture’s Literary Prize

The winners of the 2020 Pondus Prize are Nora Dåsnes and Jenny Jordahl, for their fine-tuned graphic novels that tell the stories of girls in between childhood and youth. For the first time the Pondus Prize goes to two authors for two separate titles: Jenny Jordahl’s What Happened to You? and Nora Dåsnes’ Cross My Heart and Hope to Die. This year the award is raised from NOK 100,000 to NOK 150,000. – For me both are important books. In their own way, they tell the stories of growing up and about acceptance, to be accepted by others than themselves. Dåsnes and Jordahl breaks elegantly out of the traditional comic book routes to tell their stories. It is smart art of storytelling from first to last page.
Frode Øverli, leader of the jury, the Pondus Prize

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