The plan is meant to unfold quietly. Avery and Theo, home for the first time since starting college, will hold hands in front of their three oldest friends, accept the shrieking, and later find gentle words for their exes in private. Then Grace’s cousin Matt, a man who spends his days shouting over machine-shop noise, hears the news by the keg and repeats it to the entire party at full volume. Every graduate of Itasca High in the house cheers. And through the kitchen door, at that precise second, walks Theo’s ex-girlfriend Izzy. The Friendsgiving Pact by Elizabeth Davis begins with a lie told to the people least likely to question it, and then makes sure the lie has a witness it was supposed to protect.
The Friendsgiving Pact Plays to a Packed House
What gives the novel its pleasant hum is that nobody in Itasca, a fictional town of about ten thousand somewhere north of the Twin Cities, is surprised. Classmates have had money riding on these two since sophomore year. Harper has proposed a June wedding within a minute of hearing the news. Even the dentist at the country club has an opinion about Theo’s major. Davis writes the town as a gossiping chorus, and the joke underneath is that a fake relationship is the easiest thing in the world to sell to people who decided years ago it was real.
The chorus has a class edge, too. Avery’s parents are the hospital’s star doctors, with a formal living room used mainly for spare tables. Theo lives across the train tracks with his mother, a night-shift hospital worker, his little brother and a stepfather who drives a county snowplough. One of the quietly good scenes in The Friendsgiving Pact by Elizabeth Davis finds that stepfather, Karl, taking over the ironing of a borrowed shirt before a country-club party and offering Theo some halting advice about being patient with someone who keeps her troubles hidden. Karl parked cars at that same club as a teenager, and he remembers the tips as well as the drunken drives home.
As for the holiday in the title, the word “Friendsgiving” never actually appears in the novel. The nearest thing to one comes on Thanksgiving night, after the family dinners are done, when the five friends cram onto a plaid couch in Tommy’s wood-panelled basement for a vicious MarioKart tournament whose results one friend has logged in a shared document for two years, a second dinner of frozen pizza and a sledding run in the dark toward a half-frozen pond. It is the warmest sequence in the book, and the clearest picture of what these friends mean to each other.
The Ex Who Deserved Better
The novel’s best moral instinct concerns Izzy. A lesser romance would make the hero’s ex a rival to be beaten. Here she is an art student with dignity and a fair complaint: she learned at a party, along with half the town, that she had been replaced, and she suspected all along that she would always come second to the best friend. The Friendsgiving Pact by Elizabeth Davis lets her say so, more than once, and lets Grace tell Theo plainly that the public reveal was cruel to her. When Izzy later makes her own peace with him, it is one of the most adult conversations in the book.
The same honesty extends to the friend group. Harper, the softest of the three, is the one who walks out of a diner brunch and refuses to speak to Avery until she has sorted herself out, and the novel treats that ultimatum as the push Avery needs rather than as a betrayal. Back on campus, her roommate Savannah, written off early as a sorority-obsessed stranger in pink, turns out to be wry and perceptive and becomes her first new friend in years. The ensemble is the book’s real asset.
Where the Romance Stalls
The prose is brisk and conversational, and the dialogue is the strongest part of it: quick, profane, and convincingly like eighteen-year-olds who have finished each other’s sentences since preschool. Chapters alternate between Avery and Theo, and the switches are well timed, so a scene that ends on one character’s confident reading of a moment often reopens on the other’s panic about it. That dramatic irony carries The Friendsgiving Pact by Elizabeth Davis through its first half with real momentum.
The weaknesses sit in the central couple’s plotting. Once the secret Theo has been keeping comes out, the two of them argue about honesty, then argue again, and the second and third rounds cover the same ground as the first without much new information. Avery’s reaction is eventually explained by a family betrayal she has been carrying for years, but that explanation arrives only after the breakup, so it reads as a justification rather than a revelation.
The December stretch that follows is pleasant and low in stakes, and it is where The Friendsgiving Pact by Elizabeth Davis most clearly loses its holiday footing: a run of finals, roommate scenes and a flashback that tells readers what they already knew. And the ending settles everybody with suspicious ease, down to an amicable divorce and a reformed ex. Readers should also know that this is an open-door romance with explicit scenes, and that the book carries underage drinking, constant profanity, parental infidelity and a drunken shove at a party.
Why Elizabeth Davis Keeps Pretending
Elizabeth Davis has made the fake relationship her signature. This is the third of her novels built on a pretend romance, and here the device is surrounded by a full holiday cast of friends, parents and siblings. She lives in Minneapolis and describes herself as someone who actually enjoys cold weather and rainy days, and the novel’s snowbound roads, frozen lakes and Main Street shops have the ease of a writer working close to home.
The book is dedicated to a friend group of her own, and her acknowledgments thank her longtime friends for, in effect, making the book possible. It shows. The scenes that work best in The Friendsgiving Pact by Elizabeth Davis are the ones where five people who have known each other forever shout over a video game or close ranks against one of their own, and those scenes feel drawn from life. She also writes, with some amusement, that she stumbled into a romance career largely by accident.
Final Thoughts
For readers who want more teenagers pretending on the ice, Lynn Painter’s Fake Skating is younger and sweeter and closer to a pure comedy. Anyone who would rather see a Thanksgiving weekend go badly wrong should turn to Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, where the holiday is a pretext for very different kinds of secrets.
What lingers from The Friendsgiving Pact by Elizabeth Davis is a flashback to a school gym on homecoming night, where a boy who swore he would never attend a dance shows up in a suit to rescue a friend who had been abandoned that morning, and nearly says what he will spend the next year not saying. The novel around that moment is uneven, but the moment itself is honest. Readers who love friends-to-lovers and do not mind a quarrel that circles will find enough here to fill a long weekend. Everyone in Itasca, after all, saw this coming.