Swear on This Life - Renee Carlino

Swear on This Life was the Deliberate Reader book club pick for December 2017, which made Thanksgiving weekend a perfect time to read it.  The book has pretty stellar reviews on Goodreads and a promising premise, so I can see why it was selected.  The story follows Emiline, who discovers that her childhood best friend and first love wrote a book about their experiences, and her supposed life after them, from her perspective, and it is a huge bestseller.  Emiline, who hasn't heard from Jase in more than twelve years, is furious, because he's profiting off her pain and suffering and he's not even getting it right.  But what to do?

So, this had the potential to be good.  But it really wasn't.  The problem is not the plot, or really the characters, but the writing itself.  The entire book, which is composed both of first-person snippets from Emi and of excerpts from the book Jase wrote, All the Roads Between, is flat and lifeless.  It's all telling and no showing.  "I couldn't believe he lied."  "I was so mad."  And so on.  There's a great lack of emotion here, which is somewhat astounding for a story that should have been absolutely bursting with it.  Emi and Jase's story is a hard one to read...except it's not, because there's no feeling embedded in all of the terrible things they went through.  Instead, this book reads like a dry recitation of the facts, instead of a tale that pulls heartstrings and evokes tears and rage and passion.

The nesting of the stories in a sort of Russian doll fashion was interesting, but it wasn't enough to carry a book that lacked any dimension.  I could understand Emi's pain and anger and longing, but it wasn't conveyed very well and I had to do a lot of pulling on my own emotions in order to make it all "click," something that a well-written book should do for me.  And while I think both Emi and Jase were promising characters and could have shone with a little more polish, the supporting characters were all pretty bland and flat, lacking any and all sense of dimension.  I absolutely could not believe that this was a book about a bestselling book because it was so poorly done.  And you know what?  Carlino is aware of this.  You know how we can tell that?  Because at one point Emi points out that Jase's book isn't well written and is just being lauded because it's a story about two kids in bad circumstances.  And that's exactly what the book as a whole is!  Are people really okay with that, or are the majority of readers seriously not catching on?

Overall, bland, not worth the hype, and dear lord I actually spent Thanksgiving weekend reading this.

2 stars out of 5.