A review by mayday_the_cleric
Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

Did not finish book. Stopped at 32%.
The characters felt so woobified somehow, carefully curated to make you feel for them and relate to them, but in contrived way. One moment, Wallace was an uptight person and one of the founders of a highly successful law company. Someone who has lead a tough life and been hardended by it. The next, almost immediately after he died, he became a blubbering kid who suddenly started questioning everything about himself and threw away all the hard characteristics that he had before for a more mellow personality without any actual reasons. It’s almost like he forgot who he was before, and now, just because the people around him spew some platitudes and pseudo-philosopical questions about life or whatever around him, he suddenly has epiphanies that changed his life perspective so quickly without any actual buildups to it. Because of this, the revelations that he came to after only spending a few days in a tea shop with a bunch of strangers he hardly knows just felt so unearned and severely lacked depth. This is especially disappointing, knowing that this book came after The House on the Cerulean Sea, in which the MC had a beautiful character progression for himself, unlike in this book. 
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