What You Never Knew
What You Never Knew
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Publisher's Hardcover ©2021--
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Random House
Annotation: Told in alternating points of view between the living and the dead, Jessica Hamilton's debut novel will be perfect for f... more
 
Reviews: 2
Catalog Number: #358177
Format: Publisher's Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Copyright Date: 2021
Edition Date: 2021 Release Date: 04/13/21
Pages: 294 pages
ISBN: 1-643-85696-0
ISBN 13: 978-1-643-85696-4
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 2021286069
Dimensions: 25 cm
Language: English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews

When a young woman rediscovers her family's summer home, it raises uncomfortable questions about the disappearance of her father years earlier.Waiting in a lawyer's office to deal with her mother's estate seven months after her death from lung cancer, May has no idea that this will be her own final hour. Her death in a car crash leaves her younger sister, June, alone in the world, sorely missing the sister who gave her the warmth their own mother could never muster. June is surprised when the deaths of her mother and sister leave her in possession of the family home on Avril Island in Lake Champlain. After a trauma on the island some years before, May had sworn never to return, but interspersed chapters in the warning voice of May's ghost don't keep June from revisiting the summer place. Once on the island, June is held by more than her strong sense of nostalgia. Ezra Keen, the all-grown-up son of the island's caretaker, has taken over the maintenance of the house, and seeing him brings back June's memories of their first kiss many years before. But not all her childhood memories of Avril Island are so good. June starts to remember things about the island that seem related to her father's disappearance their final summer there, and some of the connections seem to relate to the days-later disappearance of West Keen, Ezra's father. Sinister events in the present point to someone threatening June, bringing her and Ezra closer together until their long-buried family histories endanger their renewed bond.Light and easy writing brightens the characters' traumas in this debut novel.

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Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
Reading Level: 12.0
Interest Level: 9+

Told in alternating points of view between the living and the dead, Jessica Hamilton's debut novel will be perfect for fans of The Lovely Bones.

Idyllic Avril lsland, owned by the Bennett family, where their hundred-year-old cottage sat nestled in acres of forest. Forty-year-old June Bennett believed that the island had been sold after the summer of her father's disappearance when she was only twelve years old. It's months after the shocking death of her older sister May in a fatal car accident, that June finds out that the cottage was never sold. Avril Island is still owned by the Bennett family and now it's hers.

Still reeling from the grief of losing her sister, June travels back to Avril lsland in search of answers. As she digs, she learns that the townspeople believe her father may in fact have been murdered rather than having abandoned his family in the dead of night, as she was led to believe by her mother. And that's when she begins to notice strange things happening on the island--missing family possessions showing up, doors locking on their own, unexplained noises in the night, shadowy figures disappearing into the woods. It takes June no time at all to realize that her childhood summers at Avril Island were not at all what they had seemed to be.


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