55 pages • 1 hour read
Meagan BrandySay You Swear (Boys of Avix, #1)
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Meagan Brandy
Meagan Brandy is an American author specializing in adult romance and sports romance novels. She grew up in California, where she resides with her husband and three sons. Brandy has published over 15 novels in the romance genre. Her Brayshaw series includes Boys of Brayshaw High, Trouble at Brayshaw High, Reign of Brayshaw, Be My Brayshaw, and Break Me. Her Fumbled Futures series includes Fumbled Hearts and Defenseless Hearts. Say You Swear is the first novel in her Boys of Avix series; its sequel is the forthcoming October 2024 title Promise Me Not. Much like her Brayshaw series, her Avix series features stories about characters who all attend the same school. Brandy has also published several standalone novels, including Fake It ’Til You Break It, The Deal Dilemma, Badly Behaved, Wrong for Me, Dirty Curve, and Not So Merry Memories.
Throughout her writing career, Brandy has established a significant following on both “Bookstagram” on Instagram and “BookTok” on TikTok. Her social media presence has resonated with her fans and young readers. In the Acknowledgments section of the source text, Brandy specifically thanks her “[b]loggers and early readers” for being “such an important part of [her writing] process” and for “help[ing] spread the word” about her newest publications (527).
Brandy is best known for her emotionally charged stories, which feature complex romantic and sexual relationships. Across her oeuvre, Brandy explores themes of love, loss, heartbreak, and connection. Many of her titles also incorporate high school, college, and sports dynamics, social contexts that inform her characters’ interpersonal bonds and conflicts. Brandy’s self-described investment in her sons’ sporting teams and her attachment to California inform many of her novel’s narrative settings and conflicts.
Genre Context: Contemporary Romance
Say You Swear is a contemporary romance novel. The novel incorporates thematic elements of both the campus and the sports romance subgenres and uses its main characters’ experiences on the football field and their Avix University campus to inspire organic conflicts between them. The novel is in conversation with parallel romance publications, including Tessa Bailey’s Fangirl Down, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Forever, Interrupted, and Abbi Glines’s Until Friday Night. Like Brandy’s novel, Bailey’s, Reid’s, and Glines’s novels use sporting arenas and tragic experiences to usher their main characters toward change and complicate their budding romances. Say You Swear is also reminiscent of the themes, conflicts, and genre tropes found in other contemporary romances, including Annabel Monaghan’s Summer Romance, Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands, and Genevieve Wheeler’s Adelaide. Like Say You Swear, these novels pose questions about the life-changing and healing powers of true love.
Say You Swear also incorporates elements of both the friends-to-lovers and love-triangle tropes. Indeed, the main characters Adelaide Johnson and Noah Riley’s relationship begins as a close friendship, which emerges out of the characters’ need for love and care. Over time, their friendly connection develops into a heated romance. Brandy nuances this narrative trope via Chase Harper’s character, the other young man with whom Adelaide is in love. Combining this love-triangle conflict with the friends-to-lovers plotline, in turn, begets surprising narrative twists and plot turns, both of which are characteristic of Brandy’s distinct writing style and approach to telling complex romance and coming-of-age stories.
