T. J. Klune's UNDER THE WHISPERING DOOR

Thanks to partners NetGalley and Tor Books for the digital ARC of T. J. Klune’s Under the Whispering Door in exchange for an honest review. The book will be published on September 21!

I cried my way through large portions of T. J. Klune’s Under the Whispering Door. While ultimately, I would call it a beautiful, hopeful book, it is also deeply, deeply sad. I mean, it is about death and the afterlife, so I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise, but I’m just putting that out there.

Here’s the setup: Wallace is a horrible Scrooge of a fellow who is financially successful but just a miserable human being. He’s basically alienated everyone with whom he’s ever had a relationship, but he doesn’t even recognize that because he’s so focused on work and power and money. In fact, he takes an odd sort of pride in being needlessly cruel.

Then, he dies suddenly of a heart attack. And all of those concerns that consumed his life and his time are gone.

The world he enters is populated by an eccentric crew: reapers—in this case, a reaper named Mei; a ferryman named Hugo; and the ghosts of Hugo’s grandfather Nelson and dog Apollo. Wallace is stuck in Hugo’s tea shop until he can accept his death and figure things out and be ready to cross through a mysterious door on the fourth floor.

The world building is more complex than I can or should cover, but there are fabulous conversations about Hugo and Mei’s responsibilities to the dead; about what matters in life; about who we choose to be when and if we have the chance to reconsider our choices.

I feel as if I should address a big question here since I’ve been raving about The House in the Cerulean Sea since I read it (and that’s a big reason I requested this book!): Under the Whispering Door is NOT The House in the Cerulean Sea, nor does Klune try to make it that book. I always feel as if the expectation game is so fraught, so when I go in with high expectations, I’m almost always disappointed. Did Whispering Door bring me to the giddy heights that Cerulean Sea did? No. But that’s okay. I still found myself thinking and smiling and crying. This book is a success all on its own merits, and for me, it survived the peril of comparison with one of my favorite books of the year.

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