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TJ Klune's "The House in the Cerulean Sea" was one of my favorite books I stumbled on this year, so I was beyond excited to hear about "Under the Whispering Door". There are a number of similarities across both novels, but this one definitely stands in a category of its own.

Our protagonist is Wallace Price, an uptight and unemotional 40 year-old lawyer who passes away from an unexpected heart attack - and as a ghost, is guided to Charon's Tea and Crossing, a teahouse inhabited by a number of different characters. There's Hugo, the owner and ferryman; Mei, the reaper; and two ghosts - Nelson (Hugo's grandfather) and Apollo (Hugo's dog). It's a slipshod cast of characters, but as Wallace discovers more about this world and the people he comes to live with, we get to see him change and evolve as a person, albeit after death.

For me, the book wasn't perfect. At least in the beginning, it seemed that TJ Klune recycled too many similar themes and characters from his previous novel (i.e. a grouchy main protagonist getting forced into a new environment and people, same-sex relationships developing, etc.) and there were a number of sexual innuendos and references that seemed unnecessary to me. I spent much of the first half of the novel confused about this new world and how things worked; while many of these were explained later in the novel, it made some of the initial sections hard to get through. Nonetheless though, the second half of the novel more than made up for the initial hiccups for me, and I think TJ Klune has done a fantastic job creating a novel that handles such difficult topics like death so well.

Thank you Tor for the Advanced Reader Copy of the novel!