Under the Whispering Door isn’t a sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea, even though the covers look so similar–and even though TJ Klune uses the word “cerulean” no less than three times throughout the book, which is three times more than I’ve ever seen it in any other book besides The House in the Cerulean Sea. It felt sort of thematically the same, though–a sweet love story, a redemption story, and one about found family. I think I liked The House in the Cerulean Sea better.
Under the Whispering Door is the story of Wallace Price, who is dead, and the people who are tasked with helping him get to the afterlife: Mei the Reaper, Hugo the ferryman (plus Hugo’s ghost grandfather Nelson and ghost dog Apollo). When the story begins, Wallace is a terrible person who dies of a heart attack after firing a loyal employee for a small mistake. He has trouble believing he’s truly dead, and is just all around unpleasant. Eventually he sort of comes around, gets into some ghostly hijinks, and then circumstances arise that mean he has about 7 days to try and redeem himself before he’ll be forced to move on to the afterlife (which is behind the whispering door of the title).
The good: the story is very sweet and heartwarming, particularly the parts about everybody’s tea, I loved that little detail. I teared up at the resolution of Apollo’s storyline.
The bad: it felt like it took forever to get going. It’s about two-thirds over before the whole “7 days to live a whole life” thing comes into play, and so if you’ve read any summary of the book beforehand you spend a lot of time wondering when anything is going to happen. I also struggled with Wallace’s transformation from complete a-hole to sweet, loving, and compassionate.
The meh: The love story in The House in the Cerulean Sea felt earned to me, and I was totally invested. I didn’t feel that way with this book. The love story is certainly very sweet and charming, but I just didn’t care about it very much. I think because the characters aren’t very well-drawn? Other than Nelson, I don’t have a good sense for who any of them are. Part of that is due to the fact that Hugo and Mei have to be sort of otherworldly because of their jobs, but it means they seem less like actual people. Hugo, in particular, is almost insufferably saintly. And then Wallace, as I mentioned, has a character transformation that I found a little hard to swallow.
Overall, this was fine! I enjoyed it. But it was kind of inconsequential, and, considering the subject matter, it could have had a lot more substance.
