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.
Themes
The Healing Power of Love
Content Warning: This section mentions miscarriage, the death of a parent, and a car accident.
Arianna and Noah’s romance helps them overcome their sorrow and grow beyond their trauma. Both characters feel lost and alone when they meet. The novel uses their emotional unrest to instigate their connection with one another. Before they reconnect in college, Arianna is crying herself to sleep each night over what happened with Chase. Meanwhile, Noah is struggling to reconcile his desire for an independent future while his mom, Lori, experiences illness. In each other, they find the comfort and strength to confront and process these personal conflicts. For Arianna, it’s “Noah’s candid expression” and “sincere desire to understand” that inspire her to open up to him (123). For Noah, it’s Arianna’s selflessness and empathy that inspire him to invite her into his life. In these ways, Noah and Arianna offer one another the love and care that they need during difficult times in their lives. The love that they foster together gradually helps them heal from their pain and embrace life anew.
The novel particularly uses the scenes of Arianna and Noah cooking together to capture the healing power of their connection. Whenever Arianna watches Noah cook, she notices the “peaceful look on his face” and “the ease of his movements” (171). Noah appears “at home when cooking,” which, in turn, reminds Arianna “of being at home” with her parents and brother (171). The kitchen is a setting that offers the characters familiarity and security. While cooking dinner, they are working together to make something new. Meanwhile, the cooking process grants them the freedom to communicate openly while they work and offers both Arianna and Noah the space to articulate their experiences in a safe environment. In these ways, the cooking scenes capture and convey how love can nurture an individual while granting them safety.
Furthermore, Arianna and Noah’s ability to maintain their connection despite the conflicts they face proves the power, strength, and stability of their romance. Arianna’s accident, amnesia, and miscarriage, as well as Noah’s mom’s death, are all trials that Arianna and Noah must overcome together. These conflicts do initially strain their relationship. However, over time, the characters find their way back to one another. Simply being in one another’s company while walking on the beach or having late-night conversations, for example, makes them feel at home again. In turn, they feel strong enough to face their sorrows and overcome them with one another’s help. The novel uses the young couple’s relationship to illustrate how love might transform an individual over time and help them heal from grief and pursue newness and redemption.
The Importance of Friendship and Family
The primary characters’ close interpersonal relationships illustrate The Importance of Friendship and Family to an individual’s stability and growth. This is particularly true for Arianna, who has considered her friend group an extension of her family ever since she can remember. Indeed, Arianna is afraid of starting college in the fall because she’s “not naive enough to assume that [her and her friends’] lives will stay the same” or “that it will be [the five of them] for always” (5). She fears the ways that life might draw her, Mason, Brady, Chase, and Cameron apart because she relies on her friend group for safety, stability, and comfort. Indeed, Arianna doesn’t “do well without family nearby” and is desperate to keep her close group of friends intact (6). To Arianna, friendship and family are the keys to survival. Throughout the novel, however, Arianna must redefine what these relationships mean to her when her fraught dynamic with Chase threatens to tear her friend group apart. These conflicts challenge Arianna and her friends to remember their connections with one another and fight for the relationships they have built over time.
Noah’s character rediscovers The Importance of Friendship and Family via his relationship with Arianna. For as long as Noah can remember, his definition of family has been limited to his relationship with his mom. In Chapter 15, he tells Arianna that he “never had more than her, so there was never anything to miss” (152). Arianna can’t initially comprehend Noah’s life in that she “can’t imagine life without [her] friends and family” (152). She and her friend group invite Noah into their lives and social sphere. Mason particularly reminds Noah that as soon as he and Arianna became involved, Noah became a part of their family. Indeed, even Arianna and Mason’s parents welcome Noah into their home and lives and treat him like yet another of their children.
The characters keep each other close throughout the challenges they face because they all know that it “would be so hard if [they] didn’t have open arms to fall into when life got tough” (152). In the same way that Noah and Arianna’s love buoys them through difficult times, the characters’ relationships with friends and family help them overcome sorrow, doubt, fear, and loss. All the friends band together when Mason is injured during the football game, when Arianna is hit by a car and loses her baby, and when Noah’s mom passes away. These narrative plot points are illustrative of life’s constant challenges. However, because the characters have one another, they can face and survive these challenges. Their refusal to give up on one another, even amid sorrow, frustration, or misunderstandings, captures the novel’s central notion that friendship and family are key to an individual’s well-being.
The Journey Toward Self-Discovery
Arianna’s and Noah’s intertwined storylines trace their respective journeys toward self-discovery and self-realization. At the start of the novel, Arianna and Noah are both anticipating a crossroads in their lives. Arianna is on the verge of starting college and is embarking upon a new chapter in her life. To Arianna, “[l]eaving home is as real as it gets” (6). Furthermore, Arianna’s conflicts with Chase during the final days of summer augment the intensity of this transitional point in her life. She is not only saying goodbye to her parents and discovering what it’s like to be on her own for the first time but also healing from heartbreak over her childhood love. These facets of Arianna’s storyline usher her toward change and personal growth and challenge her to ask difficult questions about who she is and what she wants out of her life.
Meanwhile, Noah’s character is anticipating college graduation and asking himself difficult questions about who and where he wants to be in the future. His relationship with his mother particularly complicates Noah’s ability to conceptualize how he should shape his life after college. When he finished high school, he didn’t want to leave his mom. Then, when Lori had a stroke two years before the narrative present, Noah couldn’t leave town because he “wanted to be there for her” (220). Noah’s relationship with his mom makes it difficult for him to pursue his own life. He wants to make his mom proud and believes that succeeding in football will help him do so. However, his experiences throughout his senior year gradually begin to change his outlook on his future. Noah’s relationship with Arianna particularly contributes to his internal evolution and orients him toward a life that he hadn’t previously expected.
The challenges that Arianna and Noah encounter throughout the novel gradually alter how they see themselves and interact with others. The novel uses the conflicts they face to evolve their characters and lead them toward self-realization. As Arianna struggles to regain her memory after the accident, for example, Arianna’s mom suggests, “That maybe it’s you who’s different” (425). Indeed, like Noah, Arianna has come into herself at Avix and changed for the better. The novel illustrates how the college experience particularly can influence an individual’s sense of self. The primary characters’ time at Avix opens them up to new experiences and relationships, which ultimately help them discover their true selves.
