Bumpy Oak Books

4 stars

**I was provided an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**

TJ Klune’s newest work, Under the Whispering Door, explores life, death, and grief with care and humor. Readers follow Wallace Price, who is a white-collar attorney and a bit of a jerk. When Wallace has a heart attack, he discovers there is more to life and death than he bargained for, courtesy of a Reaper and Ferryman charged with leading him to cross over.

Klune, in consideration of his readers, included a content warning in the form of an author’s note at the beginning of the book. This book deals in depth with grief and death, including deaths of various types (illness, suicide, accident, sudden, unexpected, etc). This book may be too much for some readers based on that content. I am not a reader who has anything I would list as a trigger. I work around dead people daily as part of my profession. Yet I still caught myself needing a minute to gather myself due to feeling anxious at some of the passages. If you have discussions of death and dying as a trigger, this may not be the book for you.

That being said, Klune still managed to make this novel into a hopepunk sort of low fantasy. There is a sort of whimsical tone that infuses both this novel and The House in the Cerulean Sea. While the latter is more joyous and lighthearted throughout, this book is more pensive and reflective. Both leave the reader with a message of hope in adversity.

Klune’s strength, to me, continues to be his character work. Mei, Wallace, Hugo, and Nelson were all perfectly lovely characters. I also enjoyed Nancy and Cameron’s character arcs. I found the ending of the book to be very predictable, but if I am honest with myself I would have been disappointed and unsatisfied if it had ended any other way.

Overall, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to read this book early and am eager to go through more of Klune’s backlist while waiting for his next release.