Told alternately by June and the ghost of her sister May, this is a gothic story of family secrets and lies. June and May both thought that Avril Island had been sold when their father disappeared back when they were teens. May's shocked, therefore, to discover that she's inherited from her mother but before she can investigate further, she's killed, leaving the island to June. June finds there's a lot she didn't know about both her parents, especially with regard to why her mother took the girls away. Creepy things happen to her once she's in the house (loved the atmospherics of the abandoned building) but she renews a relationship with Ezra that turns to a bit of romance- or does it. No spoilers from me but this one does get a little nuts near the end. Not a bad thing because it's very entertaining. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A nice debut for fans of suspense.

Wow. I picked this up and could not put it down that I read in a day. Hamilton’s writing is so descriptive that I was transported to Avril Island with all its eerie, spine chilling beauty. Her brilliant plot and well-developed characters take you on roller coaster of twists and turns that keep you riveted from page one.

Told from alternative points of view of two sisters, one living, one dead. Reeling from grief of losing her sister, June returns to Avril Island after thirty years. Upon her arrival, June learns that the town’s folk believe that her father may have been murdered and thus begins her search for the truth. But is everyone happy that a Bennett is back on Avril Island?

This book had me engrossed…can’t wait for the authors next book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Crooked Lane Books for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is the story of the three Bennet women, named for the months April, May and June. April, the mother, was always and aloof character to her daughters, and after making the girls flee Avril Island and telling them their father left them, the women never returned to the island, April telling them she sold it. Only after April and May’s deaths 20-plus years later, does June discover that it was all a lie: ownership of Avril island has passed to her now, and the locals aren’t exactly happy that a Bennet is back in town. It seems April kept many secrets from her daughters, including what may have really happened to their father all those years ago.

This book is told from two perspectives: June’s, as she tries to navigate the world after the death of her beloved sister and deal with the news that her mother has been lying to them for years, and May’s as she observes June’s actions from the afterlife. It created an interesting dynamic that allowed the reader to see the womens’ emotions and memories on different levels and round out the picture.

There was a lot of suspense in this book because it seemed like with each new chapter came new revelations about the characters and their motivations and pasts. There’s a lot going on here, and I don’t want to spoil it, but there are a lot of secrets in the community and everyone seems to have long memories. I did not figure out what was going on until it was revealed and I was pretty satisfied with the solution.

The ending itself was OK. It wasn’t unexpected, but I guess I was hoping for a little different. Anyway, it’s fine, nothing that made me upset or ruined the book for me. It was actually very cathartic and wrapped things up nicely.

This book was very well done both from the family drama aspect and the mystery angle. I really enjoyed reading it and would certainly read more from Jessica Hamilton.

This book is well-written but a bit too slow-paced for my liking. The story is told from the perspectives of two sisters trying to uncover the truth behind her childhood lake house and her father's disappearance. It was a quick, enjoyable read that kept me guessing. I really liked how the tension was built up!

The books centres on sisters May and June. When June inherits an old family cottage upon May's sudden passing, it leads her to go and uncover the family secrets whilst staying there.
The story is strong, fold from two perspectives, June struggling with her grief and May watching and narrating from beyond the grave.
The eerie abandoned cottage is the perfect scene for the family drama. Seeped in mystery and dripping with a creepy aura.
Whilst there were parts of this I enjoyed I found myself feeling I never really got to know or connect with the characters.
I did however enjoy the surprises and twists even though I did spot a few coming.
All in all a good family mystery, with added intrigue and complexities of complicated family relationships.
Thanks to netgalley and Jessica Hamilton for the ARC copy.

What You Never Knew by Jessica Hamilton is a recommended atmospheric mystery.

June Bennet's mother passed away, followed tragically by her older sister, May. Settling May's will, June now learns, at age forty, that she owns Avril island. She had been told the island with her family's hundred-year-old cottage on it was sold years ago, after the summer she was twelve and her father disappeared. June travels to the island in search of answers. She had spent her summers on the island with her beautiful and mercurial mother and beloved, protective older sister May. Now she is alone to face what happened in the island and look for answers. Soon it becomes clear that what June was told was not the truth about what happened years ago and that her family, i.e. her mother, had rumors swirling around her during that time.

As June grieves for May, May is there, haunting her in a sense, as a ghost. June is discovering the mystery behind her family's time on the island while spectral May is present in alternate short chapters, trying to help/contact June. It is an interesting idea but doesn't quite work well here. June's actual discovery of the secrets behind her family's departure from the island and her mother's duplicitous behavior are much more compelling. Hamilton provides plenty of mysterious happenings that can't be explained and clues that someone may be more than just curious about a Bennet's return to the island.

As the plot unfolds and June uncovers more information, we also learn more about June, which makes her a realistic character, but not entirely a sympathetic character. She has several flaws. The immediate attraction and connection to her childhood friend, Ezra, seemed a bit off and unrealistic to me. Certainly, most adults would take things more cautiously. I'll admit that I felt no connection for either May or June.

All in all this is a decent debut novel and I stayed with What You Never Knew for the mystery. Alas, while it was a satisfying ending, I saw it coming early on. This is a quick read; you can fly through the pages and reach the denouement swiftly. (A little note about an error: There was a description that said June put sweet-n-low in her coffee for the sugar rush, which had me laugh aloud. Certainly it will be corrected to a caffeine rush in the final edition, but this was indicative of some of the errors in the writing of the ARC.)
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Crooked Lane Books in exchange for my honest opinion.
The review will be submitted for publication on Amazon, Edelweiss, and Barnes & Noble.

I really, really loved What You Never Knew! The author did a fantastic job with describing the setting and somehow made me nostalgic for a place I have never been.

The story follows along 2 sisters, May and June and alternates between their childhood summers at Avril Island and present day as adults.

May and June remember their summers at Avril Island very fondly, up until the point their father disappeared and their mother forced them to leave the island and never return. Their mother tells her daughters she sold the island but when she passes away, the sisters discover everything they thought they knew was a lie.

April returns to the island as an adult, determined to find out the truth of what really happened the night her father disappeared. April soon realizes her summers may not be as idyllic as she recalls and there are family secrets lurking in every corner of the island.

This story follows June's return to her childhood summer home after the deaths of her mother and older sister in a short time frame. She hasn't been back since the summer she was 12 when her mother suddenly had them leave the lake house after her father left them. Now a forty year old divorced mom of twins, she finds out her mother never sold the house on Avril Island like she always said she had done and June goes back in search of answers.

I found this to be a very intriguing domestic mystery that started off pretty slowly, but had a lot of good reveals that really ramped up my interest. The lake house is on an island in Lake Champlain, Vermont. I grew up in Vermont and could immediately connect with the whole situation of out of state people coming up to their vacation homes in the summer and the tensions that can create with the locals. June's emotional journey through this story was really the highlight for me. She's grieving her mother and sister and goes to the lake house to try and process her grief and get some closure. But then finding out the truth of what happened with her father and how she had been kept completely in the dark growing up piled more emotions onto June. June returning to the lake house prompted her to examine and re-examine her memories of her summers there and now, as an adult, figuring out what was really going on with her family. When the book moved more into the mystery investigation, it would still ground the reader in June's grief which was really interesting to see how the more she uncovered the truth, the more it caused her to confront her feelings around her mother and sister. I thought the mystery was well crafted, intriguing, and integrated well into June's personal growth arc.

My favorite part of this book was the lake house. It is the only house on the island and, as such, is very remote so there's an immediate sort of eerie feeling that is contrasting with June's happy memories there. The house becomes a charter in the story as the plot develops, almost seeming to give June hints of where to look next for her answers. Not in an explicit supernatural way or anything like that, just by the very nature of being a place with a lot of history that triggers her memories. When June first arrives to the house, we get a very long and detailed description of the rooms and layout of the house. When I initially read this part, I did get a little bored because there wasn't much going on besides June walking around and noticing things like the mismatched silverware in the drawer or the quilt on the bed. These were aspects that, at that moment, didn't really mean much to the reader but as we got deeper into the story, I was glad we had that long description to really be able to picture the house and any changes that were going on. Once some spooky things start happening around the house and June learns how some of the locals feel about the house on Avril Island, it really feels like June and the house become a sort of team to protect the good times that June remembers on that island and find out the truth of what happened almost 30 years ago.

This story is told in dual POV between June and her dead sister, May. The obvious comparison is The Lovely Bones where the dead character follows the living ones as they navigate their grief and investigation. In this case, May dies in a car accident (that we get on page in chapter 1) so there's no mystery to her death. She floats in and out of the story and at the beginning is more of a third party observer to give the reader some perspective. I didn't love this choice at the beginning where I felt that the few times we got May's POV it interrupted the narrative flow of June's POV. We didn't get much of May's POV and since it was just another window to watch June through, I didn't really get the point. As the story progresses, May starts remembering things and we find out that she knew more about their father and the mystery behind his disappearance than she ever said while she was alive. These revelations did make May's chapters more engaging, but since there was no way for June to talk to May, it really felt like May was just telling the reader a bit earlier than June would find out anyway. There's also a bit of a supernatural element at play where sometimes June thinks she hears May's voice or smells her soap. But I never felt like this connection was really explored as much as I was expecting it to be. May's story did follow a very standard arc where she died, her spirit finds herself connected to June for some reason, she helps June find answers, then she is able to be free at the end. I could see what Hamilton was going for, I just didn't feel that May's character arc held the same amount of emotional tension and heaviness for me that June's did. For me, I think the story would have had a much bigger emotional impact if we were just following June and she was finding out these secrets and working through her grief of not only the physical death of her sister but also the metaphorical death of their relationship not being what she thought it was. I could see this mechanic working for readers who are maybe more spiritual than I am or who have maybe lost someone very close to them.

I really enjoyed the way June interacted with the locals and how they reacted when they found out who she is. These interactions are really fantastic, watching June interact with people who have some very strong feelings about her family and seeing her realize that the relationships she thought her family had with the town were not necessarily accurate. Some were personally involved with her family and others were just the townspeople who were around for the aftermath of June's father's disappearance. I do wish we would have gotten a bit more of that small town gossip mill going in this story and I was waiting for some sort of big party or something where everyone would get together and there would be some big reveals (like a fourth of July BBQ, for example). She also mainly runs into people who were friends with her parents but I would have liked more present day interactions with other kids June knew from back then. I think more interactions or more in depth interactions would have helped flesh out exactly how influential June's family was on the town. Or, these additional views could give us more of an insight into how June changed from a 12 year old to now and we could get her feelings on some of the ways her life didn't turn out as planned. We do get some of that when June runs into Ezra - the son of the groundskeeper - but I really wanted more.

The ending and reveals are what can make or break a mystery and I thought this book really stuck the landing. I did guess the big end reveal pretty early on, but there were still a number of reveals that I didn't see coming and I thought were pulled off well. I found all the twists to have breadcrumbs that, if you picked up on them, you could have guessed the twist but the crumbs weren't super obvious so it wasn't one of those books that really holds your hand through the reveal. I've skimmed through some other reviews and the ending seems to be a bit hit or miss where some some readers think it is asking for a bit too much of a suspension of disbelief and there were too many twists to be believable. I didn't find any of the twists to be completely unfounded and thought, overall, that the ending was pretty believable and well developed. I didn't love how the romance thread wrapped up but I found this story much more to be about June's personal journey than the romance so I wasn't too bothered. I found this a very isolated story really about June and her connection with this island so I wasn't bothered by the fact that we don't get a whole lot of information about her life before or after the events on the island. We do get a few glimpses - just enough to know that the events of the story did affect her - but we aren't diving deep into her life.

Overall, a very satisfying slow burn mystery with some very dramatic twists in the third act.

Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC.

Expected publication date: April 13, 2021.

This was an interesting, emotional family drama mystery. When June Bennett's mother dies, her older sister, May, finds out in the will that the family island is still owned by the family even though they were told long ago that it was sold. May is on her way to tell June when she is in a fatal car accident. June is then left to put together the pieces of family history and what secrets still lie on the island of their childhood summers.

There was a quote from the book that captured it perfectly in my opinion:
"Mothers are not always good just because they're mothers and fathers are not always good just because they're fathers. Wives are not always faithful, husbands are not always honest, daughters cannot be perfect and sisters cannot be saviors. The sooner we accept those variables and forgive people for them, the sooner we heal."

This mystery thriller surprised me with how gripped I was to the story and the characters. This is the first time I have read a mystery/thriller with a paranormal element and I think it just added to the novel's strengths.

This is a heart wrenching read, at times June's grief is so palpable that it is honestly upsetting. This is a novel full of realisations about how much we truly learn about our childhoods when we are adults; how parents are people and have their own lies and downfalls as well as secrets that were kept by friends and siblings and the lengths siblings will go to to protect each other.

I was kept on my toes the whole time, never being able to correctly predict what was going on. This narrative is filled with both claustrophobia and isolation due to the island setting and was genuinely terrifying at times. I really enjoyed this book and will definitely be checking out more from the author.

What You Never Knew is a slow-paced mystery book that keeps me guessing from the start. What happened to the two missing fathers? What is the secret that June’s mother hides until the end of her life?

At the beginning of the story, I felt like the story is dragging. But, till half of it, the real story unfolded, and I like the way the truth was revealed. The writing style was unique, and the twists were clever.

This book is a story full of family drama, and at the same time, there was a touch of love, relationship, friendship, and betrayal. I kind of like the characters too.

Overall, if you’re up for a slow-paced thriller but put together the clever twist that you never imagined, this book is for you.

A story about two sisters, one living and one dead. May died right after finding out that her mother had kept a secret and her sister has to clean up the pieces, including returning to Avril Island and unravelling the secrets of her past.

This was a good book with lost of twists and turns to get to the truth of two missing dad's. I loved the atmosphere of Avril Island and just the creepy feel it gave off. I really liked how June learns more about the story of Avril Island through the people that knew the Bennett family in the past. Holes in June's story is filled in by many people, including her sister May. May adds important key pieces to the story, which I thought was a good add on to the book. I wish that we were able to see more of the relationship of May and June as adults, but I also understand why it was done the way it was. In the end this was a book that kept me wanting to read and there were spots that I just couldn't stop turning the pages as I went. I look forward to seeing what Jessica Hamilton writes in the future.

I received a copy of this from NetGalley and the publisher for an open and honest review. All opinions are 100% mine.

Enjoyed this one. I felt like there was something missing though, something I needed to love it. Well thought out plot and easy to read.

Published: April 13, 2021
Crooked Lane Books
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Jessica Hamilton was born in Australia but grew up in Ontario, Canada. She has lived and worked in the Czech Republic, Taiwan, India and Japan. She studied writing at the Humber School for Writers as well as George Brown College. She lives in Orillia, Ontario with her husband, son and daughter

“My only thought—June’s going to be so mad at me.”

June returns to the island her family owns after losing her sister suddenly and tragically. June returns to the island that she thought her mother had sold years before. June returns to the island that holds more than secrets and more answers than she is prepared for. Upon her return, June is faced with many instances of the past. Small town gossip, and her first crush- Ezra. As she gets closer to the truth, the real question becomes will June survive Avril Island?

This was a different kind of thriller, but I’m not mad about it. I enjoyed how this story unfolded, and the way the truth gets revealed was clever. The way the characters were used within this book was brilliant.

The characters in this story were all fascinating in their own right. I enjoyed how the island took on a life force and that memories were also strongly represented.

There is so much to unpack in this book. The plot is really well written, the story is clearly defined, and the characters add so much to the mystery and the madness.

I enjoyed the themes throughout this book. Relationships, familial and romantic, bonds, trust, secrets, truth, and the past, are all heavily represented. But there is also a heavy focus on grief, loss, acceptance, and forgiveness.

This was a brilliant book. I did not see the twists coming, and the way they get revealed to the reader is so clever and original. There is a lot to like about this novel. There is also a lot of heavy, dark reality to be wary of.

This is the first novel I’ve read by Jessica Hamilton, and I am impressed. She is a gifted storyteller, and she paints a brilliant scene. If you are looking for a book that will make you think, make you feel, and most importantly- make you remember, this is the novel for you.

Really enjoyable read. I liked the characters. Great twisty story. Story of sisters but one is a spirit. Well written. Highly recommend.

{Thank you @crookedlanebooks @netgalley @jessicahamiltonwriter for my copy for review}

My thoughts: 👭
I loved the way the story starts. One sister finding out another family secret...and dies in a fatal crash. Leaving her sister June full of questions about their family and their island. Part of the story is told by the ghost of May. She doesn’t know why she’s back and able to watch her sister. This was one of my favorite parts, slowly May fills in for June can’t remember of their childhood. Why did they leave their island so quickly and never return? Where is their dad? Who was their mom really? I thought I knew who was trying to scare June away but I was wrong! So many secrets and trust only from threats. If you like domestic suspense, this ones for you!

Another great book with a few great twists. Towards the end it was a bit predictable, but it did not drag out unnecessarily and it still had a couple of nice surprises. I really liked the flow of the book and it made it hard to put down.

What You Never Knew is a fast paced thriller where the mystery keeps you guessing until the very end. I didn't know much about this book before starting it and really enjoyed reading it that way. If you like mysteries this will be right up your alley.

Loved the family drama - the frantic unfolding of two missing fathers and the truth.
May visits the family lawyer shortly after her mother's death. She learns the family island supposedly sold 30 years ago is still owned by her mother- now May holds the deed. She tears up the deed and head's to her sister's for dinner. Only to be killed in a tragic car accident.
Struggling with both the death of her mother and sister, June heads to Avril Island. Why did her mother keep them away, moving them across the country 30 years earlier? What really caused her father to disappear the last night her family stayed in the cabin?
June visits the town- trying to uncover why her mother kept Avril Island. She learns about her father's disappearance. Her mother's manipulation of all around her. A possible affair with her best friend, Ezra's, father. So many secrets.
And intense connection between Ezra and June - strong, nostalgic and seductive.
Does June want to know her family's truths?
I figured out within the first few chapters what really happened that last night. I still enjoyed reading about the Bennett family, May's ghost still trying to protect June, and of course June reconciling her adoration of her mother with the truth.

Thank you to NetGalley, Jessica Hamilton and Crooked Lane Books for the free e-book in exchange for an honest review.

Wow! I really loved this one! I loved how differently it starts out and that even though her sister is gone, we get her perspective on whats happening in the present time. It was a really neat way to remind us that our loved ones are with us even when we are gone. There are quite a few twists in this one and I didn't trust a single person and I still didn't guess the ending. Definitely an interesting one and who doesn't love a mystery that involves a deserted island!