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A review by claaaiiirrreee
Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
3.0
Wallace Price, a Scrooge-like lawyer, is frankly a terrible person. He lives an isolated life after alienating those around him, he is callous towards his employees and nobody around him can stand him. He suddenly dies after a heart attack and the only people who attend his funeral are there out of obligation – including Mei, a reaper who is tasked with taking him to his ferryman. Hugo, the ferryman, is an affable owner of a tea shop who is to help Wallace move onto the next phase of existence.
Wallace rages against the entire idea of death and moving on – for about 8 hours. Then, suddenly, he decides that he is not only content in this new life as a ghost in the tea shop, he undergoes a personality transformation in all of about one day. Sadly, this is where the book starts to fall apart for me. We are shown for the first few chapters of the book that Wallace is a miserable man with close to zero redeeming qualities, but we are then told that in a very brief period of time in the tea shop he overhauled his entire "deal" to become a treasured member of the tea shop family.
There is of course an interesting idea behind this character development, and it's not unheard of that a man who lived life poorly would want to course-correct in death. However, this character development is simply missing from the middle chunk of the book. We jump from point A to point Z a bit too quickly. It felt like on one page he's an awful person, and on the next page he's practically the glue holding this found family together.
I wanted to enjoy the ending and where the characters ended up, but it almost felt like a cop-out given the themes of the book and where everything seemed to be headed for 95% of the book. This book deals with grief and death – and the idea of doing your best in life and being able to move beyond – but at the last minute it felt like those themes were all sacrificed for a twist ending and warm fuzzy feelings. Not that I hate books with nice endings, but it felt like emotional whiplash for the sake of being emotional whiplash.
Ultimately, this book has a fantastic concept but lacked a bit in execution.
Thank you to Tor and NetGalley for the ARC!
Wallace rages against the entire idea of death and moving on – for about 8 hours. Then, suddenly, he decides that he is not only content in this new life as a ghost in the tea shop, he undergoes a personality transformation in all of about one day. Sadly, this is where the book starts to fall apart for me. We are shown for the first few chapters of the book that Wallace is a miserable man with close to zero redeeming qualities, but we are then told that in a very brief period of time in the tea shop he overhauled his entire "deal" to become a treasured member of the tea shop family.
There is of course an interesting idea behind this character development, and it's not unheard of that a man who lived life poorly would want to course-correct in death. However, this character development is simply missing from the middle chunk of the book. We jump from point A to point Z a bit too quickly. It felt like on one page he's an awful person, and on the next page he's practically the glue holding this found family together.
I wanted to enjoy the ending and where the characters ended up, but it almost felt like a cop-out given the themes of the book and where everything seemed to be headed for 95% of the book. This book deals with grief and death – and the idea of doing your best in life and being able to move beyond – but at the last minute it felt like those themes were all sacrificed for a twist ending and warm fuzzy feelings. Not that I hate books with nice endings, but it felt like emotional whiplash for the sake of being emotional whiplash.
Ultimately, this book has a fantastic concept but lacked a bit in execution.
Thank you to Tor and NetGalley for the ARC!