WOW. This was an intense romantic young adult thriller. First off, I didn't even know it was a thriller but I was not disappointed! It was very fast paces, with a LOT of depth that I honestly wasn't expecting.

There's grief, there's forbidden romance, and there's quite a few twists.

I personally loved the diary entries, and the multiple POV's. I felt like this book flowed perfectly and it was super easy to get into! I read most of it in one sitting.

If you are looking for a fast paced, romantic thriller than this is the book for you!

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Thank you Netgalley, Penguin Group, and Sloan Harlow for an Advanced Readers Copy! Everything We Never Said is released June 4, 2024.

Everything We Never Said by Sloan Harlow broke my heart at the very beginning. High school kids and death should never go together. Harlow’s artful description of the aftermath of a tragedy hooked me right away.
Summary
It’s the first day of her senior year and Ella is blaming herself for the death of her BFF Hayley four months ago. Worse, it seems like everyone else is blaming her, too, including Sawyer, Hayley’s boyfriend. But Ella doesn’t remember anything from that night and she’s not sure she wants to.
What I Liked
Harlow does a wonderful job of showing Ella’s grief, her isolation, and her uncertainty. I taught high school for many years and experienced the absolute horror of losing students to car crashes. The death of a young person in such a senseless manner leaves a gaping hole that Harlow describes perfectly.
The story charts Ella’s progress as she deals with complicated feelings and the budding romance with Sawyer, despite the guilt this causes both of them. Missing her friend, Ella reads Hayley’s journal to find solace but instead finds disturbing details of Hayley’s life just before her death. Images from that night resurface as Ella’s faulty memory begins to heal and those images lead her to suspect more than just a car crash led to Hayley’s death.
The story moves along at a nice pace most of the time (see Minor Criticisms) and I was never bored with it. I’m all for twists and turns and unreliable narrators and I got all those things in this book.
Trigger Warnings—but also stuff I liked.
In addition to a pretty good story, nicely told, Everything We Never Said touches on several serious issues: domestic abuse, manipulation, abusive relationships, and anger issues. I have to mention trigger warnings concerning abortion and violence as well as the situations mentioned. A little of what we used to call heavy petting occurs.
The title, it turns out, refers not only to the unsaid things between two friends when one dies suddenly but also to the way abuse and manipulation occur in a vacuum when the victim doesn’t confide in trusted friends or seek guidance from adults who care for her/him. Silence and secrecy play right into the abuser’s hands.
Everything We Never Said presents valuable discussion points for young readers along with a twisty story.
Minor Criticisms
My only criticisms are with sometimes stilted dialogue and occasional wordiness, but that’s the editor in me. Some situations might have been condensed and some excess verbiage pruned. Dialogue—especially the adults—began to sound like it was all the same person instead of used to build these characters—even though they are minor characters. Otherwise, character building was essentially good, and the high school setting struck a realistic chord with me.
Overall…
I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to high school kids and their families. Harlow’s bubbly style and her exploration of the complexities of the teenage mind make for an engaging read.

Overall I enjoyed this book. I liked the characters and the plot of the story was good. However, some things didn’t quite make sense, such as reading the diary one entry at a time and over a long period of time, especially when there are disturbing entries. Maybe that’s being nitpicking but it did irritate me. Like I said though I still enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it

Grief is a hard topic to flush out, and basing a book on such fresh loss set the bar quite high, but Harlow succeeded in a unique way. Other aspects of the novel felt less developed, or more cliche, such as twists that were easily picked up, or a fast paced romance that had less development than the mystery. However, all things combined, Everything We Never Said was a gripping novel that I finished in one sitting. It brought up emotions from loss that even four years out are still fresh in my mind. For a quick, fast-paced read, it met its mark.

2.5⭐ The mystery of this book wasn't terrible. I was drawn in, eagerly waiting to learn what actually happened. None of that matters,though. I had to skip through this YA book bc it made me so uncomfortable. If this was different, focusing solely on mystery, I would have liked it. It has the capability of being a good book, and that plot twist was great, but there were parts that weren't needed. This just wasn't it for me..

So this was a really quick read. Umm, I don’t think the execution was fully there because the last half felt all over the place and didn’t make sense. It was kind of like a YA version of Verity in the sense that it switched between POVs and we get parts of Hayley’s diary that make us try to figure out whether Sawyer is as bad as he seems.

The writing itself wasn’t something I’d normally continue reading, and the whole “I’m in love with my dead best friend’s boyfriend” tagline is a little bit misleading because it wasn’t that wild, but ultimately I pushed through because it was the kind of book you can finish in one sitting.

DNF at 15%
While the premise for the book is good, I found almost all of the dialogue to be cringey and difficult to read. For a YA book it felt like it was trying a little too hard to appeal to a gen z audience. Within the first chapter there are references to Pedro Pascal and “Mercury in Retrograde” that come across as an adult trying to appeal to teenagers based on what people say about gen z on twitter. Overall I think this book had a lot of potential, but I just couldn’t get past some of these quotes and references.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley.

I'm typically not a fan of unreliable narrators, but this was definitely a fun one! Intense and mysterious, it kept me guessing the whole time, though I did figure out some of the mini twists. It's the perfect read for a rainy day or the beach!