Review: Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson

I was very excited to finally get to reading a Peter Swanson novel; very unfortunately, Every Vow You Break was what I picked up.

I really liked the synopsis for this book, a woman, Abigail, cheats on her fiance, Bruce, during her bachelorette party, goes through with her marriage, and then sees the man she slept with on the remote island she is honeymooning on with her new husband. Drama ensues. I really found this premise very interesting.

I will start out with the things I liked about this book. The pacing is really great; I read this book very quickly. I found the tension built pretty well; I was actually nervous quite a few times towards the end of the novel. I also really liked that during a stealth sequence during this book out the main character had to find a place to use the bathroom and find food and water.

I have three major qualms with this book that completely tanked my reading experience. The most important of them is that I really like what Swanson was trying to do with this book. He was clearly trying to write a woman-centered feminist story about the ways men try to control and punish women. We see a very unbalanced anger reaction from a man because of the way Abigail wronged him. The story engages with the fact that she was manipulated into this betrayal and shows how this man's anger allows him to disregard Abigail's humanity entirely. Unfortunately, I don't think it was done well in any manner.

The way the women behave in this book just seems so divorced from how I think any woman I know would behave. The men are cartoonishly evil, and their motives and organizational structure really aren't presented in any coherent or understandable way. I am fine with the villains doing cartoonish villain behavior when I understand what they are trying to accomplish and how. Their plans just seemed so disjointed, and I couldn't stop searching them for plotholes (the reveals not really making sense is my second qualm). Abigail's backstory doesn't seem to adequately explain her actions, and her backstory was pretty lazy in explaining her behavior in the last fourth of the novel. I was so interested in what Swanson was trying to do that as I watched it unfold, I felt more and more disappointed in the execution.

My third problem is that I found what was coming fairly obvious. I didn't guess the exact structure behind what was happening, but it is glaringly obvious from the beginning that no man (aside from her father, I guess) is to be trusted in this narrative. And once the story ends up on an almost all-male island where everyone knows Bruce already, you get immediate expectations of a shadowy organization.

I really would have liked it if Abigail seemed to actually like Bruce, or if we got to see Bruce actually seem to have loved Abigail. He just seemed like he thought she was hot and fun, and he wanted to buy her loyalty. I wish I had more time to be lulled into a false sense of security with him. I also found the way Abigail talks about telling "her story" to be cringy and clunky. It seemed like it was meant to be a powerful statement about controlling her narrative but just felt flat and awkward.

Last of my smaller issues with the book, I didn't really get a strong feeling of closure from the ending of the book. All of the 'punishment' happens off the page, and we just hear a summary. This would have been alright if I wasn't left feeling like I still had so many questions I still wanted answers to. It just felt like 'the drama is done, and now everything is wonderful,' which wasn't so much what I wanted. I also think this was a place that the social commentary could have really been excellent, but it just seemed so underdeveloped.

I gave this book 2 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I have heard so many wonderful things about other Peter Swanson novels, so I still might dip into his backlist and see if any of his other work is for me. I am sure this book is a good time for some people; it is a fast read, and if it makes sense to you or if you just don't really care if the book makes sense as long as you are sucked in.