Published October 28th, 2021 by Tor
Fantasy Fiction, Contemporary Fantasy, Fantasy Comedy, Romance Novel, Gay Fiction, Ghost Story, Horror Fantasy
Thank you Tor and BookBreak for the sending me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
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SYNOPSIS:
Witty, haunting, and kind, Under the Whispering Door is a gift for troubled times. TJ Klune brings us a warm hug of a story about a man who spent his life at the office – and his afterlife building a home.
From the author of joyous New York Times bestseller The House in the Cerulean Sea.
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 sparsely-attended funeral, Wallace is outraged. But he begins to suspect she’s right, and he is in fact dead. Then when Hugo, owner of a most peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace reluctantly accepts the truth.
Yet even in death, he refuses to abandon his life – even though Wallace spent all of it working, correcting colleagues and hectoring employees. He’d had no time for frivolities like fun and friends. But as Wallace drinks tea with Hugo and talks to his customers, he wonders if he was missing something.
The feeling grows as he shares jokes with the resident ghost, manifests embarrassing footwear and notices the stars. So when he’s given one week to pass through the door to the other side, Wallace sets about living a lifetime in just seven days.
Fans of A Man Called Ove and The Good Place will fall for this queer love story by TJ Klune.
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MY REVIEW:
“It’s never enough is it? Time. We always think we have so much of it, but when it really counts we don’t have enough at all.”
When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his sparsely-attended funeral he is outraged and refuses to accept that he’s dead. But, he begins to believe her when she takes him to Charon’s Crossing, a quirky tea shop run by Hugo, a man who promises to help him cross over. Despite his life being one of all work and no play, Wallace is reluctant to leave his life behind and sets out to try and live a lifetime in the week he’s been given to pass through the door to the other side.
Witty, moving, cosy and unique, Under the Whispering Door is a book that warms you from the inside like a warm drink on a cold day. This was my tenth backlist book of the year and my introduction to T. J. Klune, an author I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. I now completely get the hype surrounding him and his books and will be prioritising reading his other books on my TBR. An exploration of life, love, death, grief and redemption, this broke my heart into a million pieces and then glued them back together. I appreciated how Klune examined the many stages of grief; how the pain of losing those we love never leaves us but leaves a permanent mark on our heart and soul. Beautifully written, richly imagined and evocative, the storytelling merged with the spectacular narration to make the story come to life around me so vividly that I felt like I’d flown through a hurricane and landed in Oz like Dorothy, opening the door to a magical and colourful new world I never imagined.
Whimsical, escapist, colourful and deeply poignant, this gorgeous fantasy is one that will stay with me long after reading. Highly recommended.
Rating: ✮✮✮✮.5
*I listened to this on Bookbeat. Follow this link to get your first 60 days of listening for free.*
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MEET THE AUTHOR:
J KLUNE is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The House in the Cerulean Sea, The Extraordinaries, and more. Being queer himself, Klune believes it’s important—now more than ever—to have accurate, positive queer representation in stories.
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BUY THE BOOK:
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Thanks for reading, Bibliophiles xxx