Review: Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

Title: Under the Whispering Door

Author: TJ Klune

Publisher: Tor Books/Macmillan

Length: 400 Pages

Category: Fantasy

Rating: 4.5 Stars

At a Glance: This story sparkles when it delves into those quiet moments where two people share their loneliness, and they become not quite so lonely anymore. It is exquisite when it reminds us to slow down and appreciate the little things, like a warm cup of tea and good company. It is exceptional when it dares to believe in miracles. It is gracious when it shares its characters’ love for each other. It is graceful when being generous and selfless in spirit.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Welcome to Charon’s Crossing. The tea is hot, the scones are fresh, and the dead are just passing through.

When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead.

And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he’s definitely dead.

But even in death he’s not ready to abandon the life he barely lived, so when Wallace is given one week to cross over, he sets about living a lifetime in seven days.

Review: Beginning a novel with a . . . let’s just say, an unpleasant protagonist, is a bit of a risk. Wallace Price is a lawyer, he’s cheerfully callous and woefully insensitive, and if I hadn’t believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that TJ Klune would, at some point, give me a redemption story that would leave me in tears, celebrating all the ways in which Wallace was made different, better, during his time in Charon’s Crossing Tea and Treats, I might not have been so determined to give him the chance to win me over.

But he did. Of course, he did. The getting there in the early going was a study in patience, though.

Wallace learned many things upon his death; how little he was going to be missed was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. For Wallace, life was transactional, nothing more, nothing less. He never did anything for anyone without being certain he was going to get something beneficial for himself in return. He was unrepentantly cutthroat that way, which made him a successful attorney, it made him a ruthless boss, but he was an abject failure as a human being and a husband. Wallace’s divorce was acrimonious, to say the least, but deep down he knew he’d done wrong by his ex-wife, Naomi, neglecting her and their marriage in the pursuit of his career, so, in this single moment in his adult life where he got nothing useful in return for his actions, apart from placating himself, he gave her everything she asked for in the settlement.

The afterlife has long been a staple of speculative fiction. It’s one of life’s great, if not the greatest, unknowns. Is death the end, or is it merely a transition to a new beginning? Klune chooses to explore the potential that death is just a brief stopover on the way to something powerful and profound in Under the Whispering Door, when Mei, Wallace’s Reaper, appears at his pathetic little funeral—where not a single one of the handful of attendees shows even a modicum of sorrow for his passing, not even Naomi—to gather him up and escort him to Charon’s Crossing to meet the man, Hugo Freeman, whose job it is to ferry Wallace on to the next life.

Wallace was a reaper of sorts himself, in that he reaped what he sowed while he lived—lots in the way of material possessions but little in the way of those things that don’t come with a price tag: friendship, love, compassion and kindness—but accepting these lessons in death, let alone accepting that he was even dead, becomes a long and painful lesson where he goes through the stages of grieving his own failures and losses, and, eventually, he grieves the person he could have been had he not been so driven and self-centered. Through the kindness of strangers—Mei and Hugo (who is also the proprietor of the tea shop), along with Hugo’s grandad, Nelson, and the loveable pup Apollo—Wallace learns how to not only mourn for himself and the opportunities he missed in life but to become someone better in death because, through patience, kindness, and the offer of friendship, Hugo and company made Wallace want to be a better person. Wallace will ultimately go on to accomplish the most selfless and generous act of his life, and afterlife, which is the moment he understands what it means to give unconditionally with no expectation of reciprocation.

Despite its weightier themes of death, grief, anger, regret, and the question of what lies beyond, Under the Whispering Door is a gentle story full of grace and wonderment and, above all else, love: love of family, love of friends, and the sort of love that means sharing everything you are, and were, with one special person. Hugo is made of warmth and peace, not a perfect person, but the perfect person for Wallace as Wallace learns to slow down and appreciate the little things he’d always overlooked along the way.

And in the end, he learns that being tethered to someone doesn’t mean being chained down; he learns it means being wanted, and wanting in return.

Klune used humor to uplift while setting out to break hearts and then put them back together again. This story sparkles when it delves into those quiet moments where two people share their loneliness, and they become not quite so lonely anymore. It is exquisite when it reminds us to slow down and appreciate the little things, like a warm cup of tea and good company. It is exceptional when it dares to believe in miracles. It is gracious when it shares its characters’ love for each other. It is graceful when being generous and selfless in spirit.

You can buy Under the Whispering Door here:
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