A review by booksanddopamine
Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
Going into this book I told myself I wouldn’t compare it to House in the Cerulean Sea, so I’m not.
If character-driven books aren’t your jam then you likely won’t like this book. The book is largely a meandering slice of life story of the lives/afterlives of the characters and how they change each other during the course of their time together. It’s a quiet book without any explosive plot points but plenty of emotional connection.
It’s a cozy read but one that’s not without darkness since the book is about grief, death, and grappling with one’s own mortality and the choices they’ve made while alive. There aren’t any new huge revelations about death that I came away from the book with, but I also wasn’t expecting to. It’s a comforting book in many ways as someone who has experienced the loss of someone close. I think that the reader’s experience with the book may be colored by their own relationship with grief and death (or lack there of).
I think the story could have been tightened up a bit to make the book a bit shorter and it still would have carried an emotional punch, but I enjoyed it all the same. Once I finished the book it continued to drift into my mind resulting in further reflection.
There's a quote from an interview with TJ Klune on hotpress [dot] com where he said, "If you live long enough to learn what love is, you eventually know what grief is. That just seems ancient as well. Combining these two things seemed like a natural fit, so that's why I set the book in a tea shop." He later goes on to say, "Under the Whispering Door is a shoulder to lean on, if you need it. It's somebody to tell you that sometimes it's okay to not be okay, so long as you don't let it become all that you know. You can feel down, you can feel angry, you can feel sad. That is perfectly within your right, but don't let that define the rest of your life."
There's a quote from an interview with TJ Klune on hotpress [dot] com where he said, "If you live long enough to learn what love is, you eventually know what grief is. That just seems ancient as well. Combining these two things seemed like a natural fit, so that's why I set the book in a tea shop." He later goes on to say, "Under the Whispering Door is a shoulder to lean on, if you need it. It's somebody to tell you that sometimes it's okay to not be okay, so long as you don't let it become all that you know. You can feel down, you can feel angry, you can feel sad. That is perfectly within your right, but don't let that define the rest of your life."
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Grief
Moderate: Suicide