Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

After weeks of waiting for Under the Whispering Door through my local library (support your libraries!), I was hesitant and excited to read it. I immediately opened it and found the Author’s Note that the book focuses on death, and there may be some triggers for readers. While I’m not triggered by death or discussions about it (y’all know I bring it up all the time with Stoicism), I knew I needed to be in the right headspace to appreciate the book thoroughly.

I gave it a few days and dove in.

TJ Klune did it again. He wrote another beautiful, moving, thoughtful book. As with his first novel, The House in the Cerulean Sea, there was an excellent representation of characters. Each character served a purpose, and they all felt real. In Under the Whispering Door, we meet Wallace – a terrible human who dies unexpectedly. He (his soul?) meets Meiying – a Reaper – who takes him to a tea shop run by Hugo – a ferryman. Hugo and Mei help Wallace make sense of his death (and of others) and help coach him to make the transition beyond the whispering door.

You meet lovely characters, like Hugo’s grandfather, Nelson (and their dog, Apollo), and some characters like The Manager instill curiosity and fear. You also meet Cameron, whose life and death dramatically affected his journey in the afterlife.

I sobbed at the end of this book. Make sure you have a box of tissues, and you’re somewhere you can ugly-cry because this book has all the feelings. While death is traditionally a complex topic, I appreciate how Klune allows hope and light to come from what is usually a somber event.

It’s easy to believe there is a little tea shop down a gravel road not too far from where you live right now. Under the Whispering Door tackles death, as the Author’s Note identifies in the beginning pages. In books, death is usually the outcome of war or disease or some flavor of tragedy, and that’s it. Klune went beyond the brevity of death and wrote a novel about what it means to live – even after you die.