Rating: 3 stars

Colette “Coco” Weber has relocated to her Catalina Island home, where, twenty years before, she was the sole survivor of a deadly home invasion. All Coco wants is to see her aunt Gwen, get as far away from her ex as possible, and get back to her craft—writing obituaries. Thankfully, her college best friend, Maddy, owns the local paper and has a job sure to keep Coco busy, considering the number of elderly folks who are dying on the island.

But as Coco learns more about these deaths, she quickly realizes that the circumstances surrounding them are remarkably similar…and not natural. Then Coco receives a sinister threat in the mail: her own obituary.

As Coco begins to draw connections between a serial killer’s crimes and her own family tragedy, she fears that the secrets on Catalina Island might be too deep to survive. Because whoever is watching her is hell-bent on finally putting her past to rest.

What makes What Never Happened an enjoyable read to me is the amount of mystery and suspense within its pages. Coco returns to a place she hasn’t been to since she was a teenager and lost everything. But the peaceful island where her aunt lives is still far from peaceful when the elderly start dying and Coco gets threatening messages, including her own obituary. I enjoyed these aspects of the story because they made me sympathize with her. But also made me invested in the story too as I wanted to know who was responsible for what happened to her family all those years ago and who was responsible for causing the deaths of these elderly people Coco was writing obituaries for. Seeing Coco be the person to investigate since nobody else was taking all these deaths seriously felt fitting due to her past and being a journalist so I was really interested to see how it would all unfold.

Another aspect of this book I enjoyed was the themes covered. Rachel Hall doesn’t hesitate when it comes to depicting all of the racism Coco experiences throughout her life. Especially when she returns to Catalina Island through the threatening messages she receives and how she gets treated when she tries to get help after receiving these threatening messages. Let’s also not forget how they tried to erase her family’s existence from ever being on this island to begin with by never really talking about their murders when they took place, which I found to be messed up. I also felt like I saw racism depicted too with regards to her friendship with her best friend Maddy who helped get her a job at the local paper on Catalina Island. Just with the way Maddy treated Coco throughout this book was terrible, from being the one to get the job working for the Times even though Coco was the better writer because her father knew someone there to taking all the credit for the story Coco wanted to write about the deaths of the elderly on the island and having Coco barely mentioned in the article. I felt like their whole friendship was Maddy being around Coco so that she could say she had a black friend, even though all she did was treat Coco terribly and take advantage of her. I know as a white person myself, I’ll never ever begin to understand all the struggles people of color go through, which is why I appreciate when reading books like this one because they allow me to get a glimpse of what it’s like to be a person of color. And I feel like the way racism is covered through what Coco experiences in What Never Happened is wonderfully done from the threats she receives once there to her terrible friendship with Maddy.

Another theme covered that I saw and appreciated was trauma and anxiety. I felt like I saw a lot of this especially with Coco’s character once she gets back onto the island. As the reader, I felt like I saw this through the observations she’d make whenever she would notice a door wasn’t locked or whenever Hall showed her having panic attacks and she’d have to take deep breaths to get through them. I feel like I haven’t seen these topics covered in a book before like this and I appreciated the way it was done here.  

I also enjoyed getting to read the obituaries Coco writes about the elderly characters in the story who died. I felt like they were all wonderful tributes to the people being described and helped show me as a reader what makes her character such a wonderful writer. It was also nice because I was able to read about characters I didn’t get to really meet in this story and find out what they were truly like. The obituaries just felt like a nice addition to have in this book to help remind me of these characters and how they lived their lives. 

However, there’s a lot with this book I didn’t enjoy as well. For starters, once the reader finds out who’s responsible for all these deaths, I feel like there’s still a lot of unanswered questions that the epilogue does nothing to truly answer. I also felt like the reveal itself regarding who killed her family and who was responsible for the deaths of members of the elderly wasn’t all that surprising. Yes, I had a different idea as to who I thought was involved and am glad I was incorrect but wasn’t surprised by who was involved or the reason as well. Considering the threatening obituaries about herself Coco was receiving, it didn’t surprise me too much that these characters were involved. There’s so much buildup until the climax only for the reveal to be characters I never liked to begin with, and I felt pretty disappointed by how it was handled. Especially because the motivation for it all was pretty predictable too. Way too predictable for me and I absolutely hated it.

What I also disliked about What Never Happened was the characters themselves. Yes, I felt sympathetic to Coco and everything she went through, but I felt like her character at times embodied the trauma she went through when she was a teenager. It felt like that was the only aspect of her character I truly saw throughout the book even when events were unfolding in the story, and I wasn’t fond of it because I felt like there could’ve been more to her than we could see. Even her aunt Gwen I wasn’t really all too fond of either along with her best friend Maddy who I felt like was in the story just to be the villain. I felt like a lot of the characters in this book were one dimensional with very little to their personalities. I also didn’t like how the one character I actually did end up liking, Noah, Hall gave him an ulterior motive when it came to his relationship with Coco. I wasn’t fond of that because I found the dynamic of their relationship refreshing and felt like that ruined what could’ve potentially been a good relationship for Coco to have when she didn’t have that many.

I overall enjoyed reading What Never Happened because it did a wonderful job of keeping me in suspense, felt like it had some themes that needed to be covered and enjoyed reading the obituaries of the characters we didn’t get to meet. However, I was disappointed by the reveal of what happened and why as it wasn’t all that surprising, and I found all of the characters very one dimensional. So while I enjoyed the story in this book, I was disappointed by its conclusion.