Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune

Amy  

fantasy

Wallace is dead. He is having trouble believing it when he finally encounters Mei, his Reaper, at his own funeral. She helps Wallace transition to his next post-death stage by bringing him to his Ferryman. Hugo makes Wallace feel welcome at his tea shop where  Wallace is to remain until he is ready to move on.

Under the Whispering Door was a slog for me.  After reading two of his novels, it’s obvious that T.J. Klune has negative opinions about office work and bureaucracy. That’s all well and good but made this novel too reminiscent of The House in the Cerulean Sea at the very beginning. (And, as an homage, Klune mentioned the color cerulean three times that I counted in this novel, by the way.) 

Unfortunately, this novel focused on the hateful protagonist, Wallace.  After his own Ghost of Christmas Future moment, Wallace moved on to a sort of purgatory which was held in a tea shop. It was a very slow process for Wallace to accept his own reality and learn to appreciate the many facets of his new lifestyle...er, deathstyle.  It turned out Wallace was a better, happier person after he’d been dead a while. How sad. I mean, I suppose it’s good that Wallace became more likeable as he finally saw himself for the jerk he’d been and started making the effort to do better. But I still had trouble really getting behind this character. I have a feeling most other readers were won over by his new attitude, resulting in the high ratings for this novel. To me, the only interesting section was about 2/3 of the way through the novel and then it lost steam once again.

While this book was summarized as being about death, it was really about life—how to live it, how to enjoy it, and what is most important to do while you’re still breathing.  It was an ode to therapy and mental health. In fact, it was all about feelings, sensitivity, and acceptance.  Honestly, as someone who considers herself a realist who is not afraid of feelings, I felt this book laid it on a bit thickly. I realize I’m in the minority on this but I almost gave up on this novel several times. I only stuck with it because it was rated well by a couple friends with whom I share opinions on many books and because I did enjoy The House in the Cerulean Sea. The ending was sweet but expected.

While the audiobook narrator, Kirt Graves, had an amazing vocal repertoire, he spoke very slowly.  This, paired with the slow-paced story, was making me impatient. So I sped up the audio track a notch which did help a bit. Sadly, the pace of the storyline was still very slow and the audiobook, at least, felt much longer than the 373 pages in book length. However, since that wasn’t Graves’ fault, I’ll give him an A- for his distinguishable cast of characters.