Every Vow You Break Review

In Every Vow You Break, honeymooner Abigail Baskin, sees her perfect future threatened when she recognizes her bachelorette party one-night stand at the exclusive retreat her millionaire husband whisked her away to.

General Impressions

I almost exclusively read thrillers as palate cleansers so I was unprepared for how much I liked this premise and most especially Abigail's situation.

Thrillers are still a very male-dominated genre, in every category from authors to protagonists to their target audience in a smaller measure so I was really excited about how wonderfully grey, some would say even downright bad of a character Abigail was and how she dealt with the threat of exposure.

I liked the writing and the overall themes the book touched on, I only wish it had spoken about them in more depth, instead of wasting so much time describing the retreat. With the exception of the flashbacks, the last fifty pages were my favourite, not only because of the way Abigail's mind worked under pressure and the effect it had on her but the way the action scenes were written in particular.

Abigail and Bruce

The biggest miss in Every Vow You Break for me was by never treating Bruce as a complex character, I wasn't able to care about their marriage, which is central to the plot. Other than a couple of lines in which he talks about the importance of honesty and a paragraph about his childhood, we never see anything from Bruce's eyes. The only character whose feelings are explored in any depth are Abigail's and even then it focuses mostly on her fear of losing the status and security that her marriage brought her. There are no loving scenes, no pillow talk that makes me root for this couple...they spent more time apart than together in their honeymoon. How can the reader care about this marriage when the characters don't?

There were so many themes that could have been explored in more depth from a male perspective such as the pressure to provide for a family, being seen as a walking wallet, having their feelings invalidated, man's rights groups...instead we spend most of the time getting creepy descriptions of the island that ultimately lead nowhere interesting.

Conclusions

When I take apart this story and look at its bare bones I can find a lot of themes I'm interested in reading, with a cast of characters that if they had been further developed would rival Gone Girl.

Thank you to Faber Faber for sending me this proof.

Rating: 3/5