I received a digital arc of #What'sLeftUnsaid from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The blurb intrigued me and I had high hopes for this. However for me something was missing. I wasn't compelled to keep reading, and when the secret was revealed I had half guessed what it would be anyway. Even the twist at the end I had sort of worked out before it was explained. There were a number of spelling and copy errors in this which I assume would have been corrected prior to publication. Not a bad read but nothing I would rush to read again in the future.

An engaging, compelling read that balances the intricacies of every day life with mystery and plot. Thank you Netgalley.

Really enjoyed the layered family dynamics in this book. There are narratives from Sasha and her mother, Annie but also from her late father Joe, which adds a different dynamic to the plot. One minor downside was that within Annie's narratives in particular, the timescales would jump quickly from her past to her present and vice versa as her thoughts moved around and it was sometimes difficult to keep up.

Three narrators take us through this story - Sasha; her mom Annie and Joe - her dead father.
Her son Zac, begins to suspect he has an older, secret sibling due to a slip of tongue from his grandmother - an alcoholic Alzheimer's patient.
Turns out everyone has something hidden away in their past.
Zac gets someone, Sarah Hardy, to film his family for a memento film and things start coming out that no-one ever planned on revealing.
Spanning from World War Two to the present day this is a story of how things we try keep secret and hidden have a way of coming out in the open and how the secrets of the parents affect their children.
I found the book well-written and even though it moves between narrators and decades you don't lose the thread of the story at all.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me the chance to read this book.

This was an interesting book and kept me hooked from start to finish. I have never really enjoyed books that has different points of view, but it did work well with 'What's Left Unsaid'. I am not going to write what the story is about, as i prefer one to read for themselves. Recommended.

My thanks to Netgalley and the Publishers for my copy. This is my honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley for my copy. 3.5*

This is an interesting tale of family dynamics and long held secrets with some very unlikeable characters. Told in different time-lines by different characters it held my interest throughout. I had no sympathy for the grandmother Annie until reading of her life in Wales as an evacuee in the war.

I just reviewed What's Left Unsaid by Deborah Stone. #What'sLeftUnsaid #NetGalley
An intense and intriguing read. I loved the three
Family member character narration and the setting was unique and I really liked the perspective. A great read that I read in two sittings.

This is a brilliant, emotional, poignant family read.
I laughed, I cried and I learnt along the way.
Once I picked up the book, I was unable to put it down, the tension kept me reading and the alternating POV held my interest.
The relationships and characters were both incredibly genuine.
Highly recommend.

This story drew you right in from the very beginning! The intrinsic detail the reader gets from every narrator not only sets the pace and scene of the book, but also helps the reader connect with each character. We get to understand the reasonings and quirks of the characters - in particular Annie and Sasha because of this and their backgrounds. This is one of the main actions on what moves the story along.

I found a couple of spelling errors and missing words, but it didn’t deter me from the story. I absolutely loved how realistic this story is, almost made me question whether this autobiographical as the themes that were portrayed were very spot on in an eccentric, disfunctional family unit. I know I can indeed spot a few similarities here...

Great decision to pick this up and read, and I’m glad I did! Thank you for giving me the chance to read it, I have already recommended this book to a few friends and family members.

I devoured this book in a day.
What's Left Unsaid is told by three points of view of, Sasha (Daughter), Annie (Mother) and Joe (Father). It skips from present to past and tells the story of how Annie and Joe coped during the war, how they came to meet, become married and have their daughter Sasha.
Secrets are unearthed, loves are lost and lives are changed.
Great book.

Secrets can be very dangerous, and secrets within a family can often do untold damage when they finally come out., as this book eloquently reveals.
Sasha is struggling, her mother is getting older, and has issues with alcohol, her teenage son is moody and belligerent and her husband is distant and disconnected. When her mother Annie accidentally reveals a family secret to teenage Zac, he begins to try to find out the truth, which in turn leads to big questions for his parents. As the story unfolds , it becomes clear that there are layers of hidden truths and tragedies woven into the family history, dating back to the second world war.
A powerful and emotional family drama with a strong central character, and a well developed plot, this was a pleasure to read , and kept me engaged and entertained from beginning to end. The pacing was spot on , and the ending packed a real emotional punch.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

This was a bit difficult to get through for me. I do like the plot of the story and was intrigued by the the historical fiction. I’m very much drawn to WWII stories, so when I got to Annie’s background, I was very engrossed in those chapters. But unfortunately, I couldn’t connect or relate to any of the characters and I wanted to so badly. Although I loved the plot, I didn’t feel the book flowed very nicely. The writing was a bit bland and abrupt. What I mean by that is, there were parts in the book where I felt there was a good flow of storytelling, a big bomb gets dropped on the reader and bam! That’s the end of the chapter and the next chapter begins with a different time frame or months have gone by. There were some pretty deep individual events in the story and the ways the characters handled them weren’t very believable. Which made it infuriating to me as the reader. I didn’t feel there was any closure for any of these characters. Overall this wasn’t a good read for me and I gave it a two stars.

This is a book narrated by three family members: Sasha (adult daughter), Joe and Annie (parents). The daughter Sasha has always felt nothing but love from her Dad Joe who has been deceased for fifteen years. Her relationship with Mom Annie is another matter entirely. It's as if she felt threatened by her daughter's fond relationship with her father. Annie also has a drinking problem. Sasha is married to Jeremy and they have a teenage son Zac. Zac has been a bit difficult to communicate with as of late. And it doesn't help that husband Jeremy is off on business trips much of the time while Sasha works in advertising from home. However, Zac recently came up with an idea to have a sort of documentary made of his family, and a young woman has been coming to his house as well has his grandmother's to film it.

As Annie is being interviewed, the reader is suddenly transported back to the war in England. At this time, children were being transported by train to the country for safety where they were cared for by other families. Annie's story of her experience at the hands of the woman who took her in during this time was simply riveting. The world could have gone away and I actually wished that the whole book could have proceeded onward from this perspective. The later part of Annie's life was quite interesting as well, where she worked in a clothing business as a model for buyers that came to purchase dresses.

Joe was much older than Annie when they married. His family was Jewish and ran a successful tailor shop. However, Joe managed to crack the entertainment industry and had his own show on the BBC. As a child, Sasha was used to the creme de la creme of society coming to their home for dinner parties. Although now deceased, Joe still narrates his point of view on the family history, and these are usually brief but very profound and honest musings.

Through these three alternating perspectives, the story unfolds of a family with hidden secrets and tragedies. I very much enjoyed the writing style of the story unfurling through the three narrators. It created a more personal connection with the reader of the complex nature of a family.

What’s Left Unsaid is an apt title for this intense novel about the things people hide or lie about in order to just keep going in life. Sasha is a mother of teenage Zak, facing his teen attitude uneasily and worriedly as he shuts her out on a daily basis. Her upbringing was without love from her mother, Anna, who is slipping quickly into dementia. Anna slips in her memories to Zak, opening a can of worms that Sasha has avoided. The truths that are revealed are devastating but somehow bring Sasha and Zak to a better understanding of each other and of the past.

Sympathy for fictional characters is often a matter of perspective; we tend to sympathize with characters whose past and point of view we know the most about. Because we understand them, we can forgive. How else could the Dexter series have been so popular? But in Deborah Stone’s unsettling family novel, What’s Left Unsaid, all the sympathy I felt for one character was weighed against the emotional damage she inflicted on all the other characters. Is it possible for someone to be so awful that it doesn’t matter how much they went through? Is there an amount of trauma that means someone gets a free pass to be horrible for the rest of their lives? These are callous questions, but something about the central figure in this book meant that I had to ask.

What’s Left Unsaid is narrated by three family members. Joe, the family patriarch and former broadcasting superstar, chimes in from the afterlife. He passed away 15 years before the book opens. Sasha, his daughter, is a frazzled mother trying to reconnect with her teenaged and newly moody son, Zac. Annie, Sasha’s mother and Joe’s wife, is fading into dementia and physical frailty. Sasha and Annie have reached a kind of detente since their most contentious years, but when Annie slips a family secret loose to her grandson, Zac, he starts stirring things up to find out what his parents and grandmother have been hiding from him.

Through Sasha’s point of view, we learn about a hot-and-cold childhood. Her father delights in her. Her mother insults her constantly and tries to push her aside at every opportunity. Because Sasha grew up in the 1960s and 70s, the adults in her life were more likely to downplay Annie’s corrosive effect on her daughter. Through Annie’s wandering memories, we slowly learn why she is so lacking in empathy and mothering skills: an abusive foster mother who “cared” for Annie after she’d been evacuated to the countryside for the duration of World War II, parents who didn’t know how to help a child with post-traumatic stress disorder, plus one more outrage before she became a mother.

It isn’t hard to see why Sasha is so anxious. Annie was a nightmare of a parent. Sasha doesn’t know what made Annie the way she is. But I have to wonder, even if Sasha did know, does that make up for the terrible things Annie has said and done to her? Now that Annie is losing her memories, reconciliation is impossible. And without the hope that Sasha and Annie might make peace, it’s left to us readers to answer that question on Sasha’s behalf. I’ll admit that I’m very torn. Annie had a horrible life before she married Joe. She suffered more than anyone should ever have to. But then, being abused as a child and a young adult can’t mean that Annie has carte blanche to behave the way she does for the rest of her life. I don’t have much to say about Joe’s story line. It didn’t add much to the novel for me other than a sense of futility as Joe fails his family repeatedly and briefly hogs the spotlight near the end of the book.

What’s Left Unsaid is a hard read. The occasionally clumsy, unnatural dialogue doesn’t help. I’m curious about what other readers will think about this book. Given that I’m a judgmental reader (in the sense that I so often read books like a judge, apportioning blame and guilt left and right), I suspect that my reaction to this book may be other than the author intended. That said, I will give What’s Left Unsaid credit for asking a question I had never considered before. I’m fascinated by the idea that sympathy and forgiveness might have limits and where those limits are. Readers who are similarly fascinated may find food for thought here. Readers looking for a psychological portrait of a family should probably look elsewhere unless they enjoy really troubled mother-daughter stories.

I found this to be an engaging and complex tale. What’s Left Unsaid tells the story of one family of three generations where secrets are buried deep.

I liked the way the story is told from different perspectives – grandpa Joe, grandma Annie, mother Sasha and her teenage son Zac.

It is a compelling read where all three generations stories are well told and very relatable. Family secrets can be devastating and once they are uncovered there is no way to put them back in the box – lives change and this story shows how keeping secrets can be as difficult as it is to talk about them.

Thank you to NetGalley and Matador for the opportunity to read and review this novel prior to publication.

What's Left Unsaid is an intimate look at a family shackled by its secrets...

A compelling family drama that spans decades, What's Left Unsaid is the tale of the Klein family that has been torn apart by the secrets that they kept from one another.
Sasha is barely keeping her life together as she raises a surly, quite snotty, teenage boy. Her husband, Jeremy is often traveling and, soon into the book, leaves Sasha to pursue his "dream." Sasha's mother, Annie, who never has cared for Sasha, has dementia and ultimately cancer, and her father, whom she adored, is dead - although, he cleverly has his input throughout the book.

As Zac, the son, attempts to uncover the family secrets, we see the horrors that this family has endured since the beginning of the 20th century; horrors that has greatly impacted this family.

Normally I adore family dramas, especially when they fall on the noir side. However, I never quite connected with these characters, which is odd because many of their "secrets" are those that my own family has encountered. No family is perfect, of course, we all have these secrets that we keep from another and "the greatest generation," those who survived the trauma of WWII, seem to hide more than most. Perhaps it was that there were too many horrors for one person to have experienced that led me to feel it was a bit overdone. Annie had to have been one of the most unlucky women to ever live and, as a result, I came to distain her rather than find her sympathetic. She then continued the horror by abusing her daughter, Sasha who, in turn, raised a teenager that was allowed to do whatever he pleased and was rewarded for being a snot with a "gap year" trip around the globe all while his parents marriage was crumbling and his grandmother was dying.
On one hand I found the research and historic elements of What's Left Unsaid fascinating. I learned quite a lot about England's side of WWII. However, because the story is told in three parts; Sasha/Annie, then Joe and back to Sasha/Annie, the story became repetitive. Yes, we were getting a different viewpoint with each telling but there had to be a better way of doing so. The ending also was very abrupt. I didn't feel closure, nor did I feel hopeful for Sasha. It was all rather muddled.

I think there are readers who will find this book fascinating and there are those who will connect with this family. Because of that I'm rating it 3.5 stars.

Thank you to Matador Books and #Netgalley for my copy of What's Left Unsaid.

I felt that this book was good, but could have been better if it was a little more organized. I thought that the story was a little all over the place. The characters were interesting.

Having never read Stone’s work before I went into this novel not quite knowing what to expect, but I ended up being rather pleasantly surprised by it.

Told from three perspectives, What's Left Unsaid is an engaging multi-generation family drama spanning decades, filled with secrets and resentments that reveal themselves in ways the reader wouldn’t necessarily expect.

The characters each have their own unique voices, but oddly enough I found Annie to the most fascinating despite being prickly and unlikable right from the start. As her story slowly unfolds, it becomes incredibly easy to empathise with her plight and understand her nature and motivations.

I found there was certainly a lot to relate to in this novel, past resentments simmering under the surface, the frustration and helplessness of caring for an elderly relative, finding yourself in the doghouse for no fathomable reason. Ultimately though, what I really enjoyed about this novel the most was its refusal to gaze nostalgically at the past through rose tinted glasses, choosing instead to show life for what back then warts and all. It was very refreshing to see in the current climate.

Will keep a look out for Stone’s other works on the back of this.

This was ARC from NetGalley and Matador for an honest review. With thanks.

A thrilling, enjoyable and enduring story. Full of suspense, secrets and lies. Written in three parts it stimulates the reader's inner psyche-and plays on your emotions. A compelling read. Recommended.