Reviews with content warning for Racism - Under the Whispering Door

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

25 reviews

raintje's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring 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

4.25

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lunablch's review against another edition

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emotional funny sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I didn't love this book. In part because of the writing, but also because the audiobook narration was kind of annoying. I probably would have liked it more if I read it.

The writing felt a little like a fanfiction because the plot was pretty predictable and the character growth was lacking. Wallace grew but not in any complex way.

I would have loved to see more of Cameron's story because it could have had interesting parallels with Wallace and Hugo. Also half the characters in the book were only there to have a crush on Hugo. We get it.

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beepmbop's review

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emotional hopeful reflective 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

3.5

it can be cheesy and redundant at times - but it made me smile a lot

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phvntom's review

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emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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pjdotcom's review

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dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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_nutella52's review

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dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

knunderb's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful 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

5.0

Such a beautiful, unique, and heartwarming book. I loved it.

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freckles's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective 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

4.5

I enjoyed it a lot. It's more skillfull in tying in its themes than the first book by the author but also more angsty in its premise.

I thought the sexual jokes about Wallace were a bit much and uncomfortable at times, though.

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sunsorbit's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Oh this book, where to start. Spoilers ahead, beware.

First of all, I listened to this as an audiobook, and I think that might have contributed to one aspect I ended up not liking.

But let’s quickly talk about what I did like:

I loved Mei and Nelson as characters. Mei is deadpan and ironic and hilarious in a way that’s really enjoyable and weirdly genuine. I enjoyed every interaction she was in, as she just felt like such a well developed character who’s grounded and a natural part of the world. Nelson is sweet and funny at the same time, and his role as the Ghost-Teacher is great. I love all his little wisdoms and the love he has for pranks, it’s just absolutely delightful. He feels like a tangible grandpa.

I also really enjoyed the start of the book, about the first arc or so, of Wallace figuring out his limits and possibilities as a ghost, even though he was still a highly unpleasant main character at that point. The interactions between him and the other characters made his unpleasantness entertaining, nobody really took shit from him, and yet nobody was deliberately unkind to him either. I especially enjoyed him and Mei getting from his own funeral to to the tea shop. She was just so funny in that scene.

One of my big and main gripes with this book was that I think it does character interactions really well, but tries to shoehorn in unnecessary side characters, connected to an even more unnecessary plot based on strange worldbuilding and lore, which ends up sidelining the emotional journey through the book, even though the plot and side characters are trying to act as character driving elements. This results in the important character interactions falling a bit too short.

Which brings me to Hugo. I think I mainly didn’t completely fall in love with Hugo because of the narrator, and that’s kind of a shame. But his character also felt a bit too flat and just… moldable to every situation to me, and I kind of wish he would have been given more of a quirk like the other characters. Mei is the sarcastically genuine teen, Nelson is the silly grandpa, Wallace is thickheaded and stuck in his ways, altho I dislike her Desdemona is absurdly ridiculous and fake, Cameron is.. well, a creepy ghoul (and super kind and lovely later), and Alan is an asshole (I’ll get to him later again), but Hugo is just serious and empathetic and kind and that’s kinda it. He’s got anxiety but I don’t really think that’s a character quirk. He doesn’t have any serious flaws or other interesting qualities that make him a dynamic and three dimensional character.

In turn his quick interest in Wallace to me felt unrealistic and strange? Wallace is a really unpleasant and unkind character for a good chunk of the book, and still Hugo started caring deeply about him, which I guess speaks volumes about his patience and ability to forgive major character flaws, but to me their relationship felt rushed (similarly to Wallace’s character development).

This ties in to the plot, which to me was absolutely entirely unnecessary. Much of the plot around Alan, the Manager’s deadline, Desdemona’s shenanigans, and even the ending, could have been much better spent letting the relationships between Hugo and Wallace (and of course them together as a family unit with Mei and Nelson) develop more slowly and naturally. I enjoyed the epilogue so much, and kinda wish more of the book had just been that: their relationships slowly progressing as they become a family.

Let’s speak of some things I hated.

Everything with and around Alan as a whole. His plot, and his entire character, the situation with the health inspector etc pp. He was an even more unpleasant character than Wallace had been in the beginning, he didn’t further any character development for the main and important side characters, he didn’t contribute to any interesting relationship dynamics, and the way he was dealt with was extremely unsatisfactory too. I don’t even have a suggestion for how I would’ve liked his story line more, or what I think could’ve been done better, that’s how unnecessary I found the whole plot. Which in turn ties to the Manager, as this is the inciting incident that makes him show up.

At first I found the character very intriguing. That lasted about 10 minutes when I realized that the Manager was entirely apathetic and even bordering on cruel at times. I don’t understand why his design was specified to be a child, his eating flowers and the whole deer imagery/metaphor felt weak and shoehorned in for random magic mystery points, and don’t even get me started on the whole deadline plot thing. It makes absolutely no sense to me that the whole reason for the ferrypeople and reapers existing is that they help people/deceased cross from the world of the living to that of the dead and then further on (to the afterlife/etc.) in their own time and that the Manager exists to make sure that order is being kept. The book even makes a point of telling the reader about how Lea’s fate and the way the previous Reaper dealt with it is unacceptable to the Manager, yet he gets to break those rules and impose a deadline for Wallace for being “distracting to Hugo”. For a being so set on order this was frustratingly contradictory and a really weak and “human” reason to give on top. At this point, Wallace isn’t even much of a distraction to Hugo, he’s being taken care of just as any other ghost coming to the tea shop, and the Manager is supposed to be a cosmic being of reality altering powers why would he ever think such a human/helicopter parent thought??? It was baffling to me. If there had been a different convincing reason given for the deadline (maybe even a cosmical fantastical one tied to interesting lore!) I think it could’ve probably been a great inciting incident. But since it ends up being entirely inconsequential and comes up rather late into the book for an inciting incident, I really disliked it (but more on that in a bit).

I also ended up disliking some chosen lore (/terminology/naming conventions) in this book.

“The Manager” is…. I really expected a cosmic being of world and reality changing power to have a cooler name. At first I thought the whole “Oh yeah we can’t mess up or the Manager will come” bit was funny and a cheeky play on typical ghost/afterlife/etc. tropes, but the fact that the Manager calls himself the Manager just felt too meta and jokey to me and not in line with his described character.
The whole hook situation was…. Considering how lighthearted and funny the book begins with the starting situation between Mei and Wallace, the moment the hook is brought in, I could not stop thinking about the hooks from Dead by Daylight. The way they were described felt unnerving and seemed painful, and the fact that it wasn’t just a “character doesn’t know the proper terminology for something so keeps referring to it in a funny/clunky alternate way”-situation but that everyone called it a hook, and the line connected to it a cable was so janky and unfitting to the other themes of the book, everytime it came up I thought about what a stupid term that was. It would have been so easy to connect this to the tea house with any other String of Fate-esque symbology, yet, alas. We got a Hook and a Cable.

Speaking of the hook, the plot around it with Cameron (which was in general a side character plot I actually really enjoyed and thought worked very well!) had unnecessarily janky parts because of the imagery attached to it. In my opinion, especially considering how Cameron died and how much of his plot is tied around Wallace finding he feels sympathy and genuine sorrow and heartache for him, having him ram a hook into Cameron’s chest (in a way that was described as painful!) was just completely unfitting to me. Wallace’s major character developing moment happens in that scene, and I just wish this would have been handled in a way that’s much more thematic and intimate and beautiful, especially considering how genuinely evocative and emotionally touching the scene is that precedes the hook-switcheroo.

I also felt like Wallace’s self-sacrifice was just not taken seriously enough, the solution to this dramatic and majorly significant action was to just tie him to a dog leash??? It’s so uncomfortably silly and it could have been handled in a much more impactful and beautiful way, especially considering that in the epilogue, Hugo can just attach new hooks to the Husks??? Why not to the ghosts and therefore Wallace??? It just didn’t make sense and thus the entire act to me felt absolutely meaningless and ridiculous. It could’ve been made into such an incredible and relationship defining moment for Hugo and Wallace, but instead they got a dog leash. Yeah. Idk man.

This brings me to the ending. I already said I really liked the epilogue and I really enjoyed the interactions between the family, and how we are caught up on the other characters, but I kinda wish the book had ended with Wallace passing on or staying a ghost instead of him being resurrected.

I disliked and found it absolutely baffling how the Manager had a totally random last minute (or rather second, that’s how quickly it happens) change of heart and just suddenly stopped caring about yet another set of vital rules to his whole thing on top of suddenly being kind for absolutely no reason at all when he had made a point to be uncaring and not understanding before? It just came out of nowhere, and ended up making the time constraint an entirely void and inconsequential plot device that served zero purpose except to speed-run the relationship between Wallace and Hugo when it just didn’t need to be that way. I don’t get it. The stakes were high for absolutely no reason, all of this could’ve been explored in a much more interesting way if the character of the Manager had been written consistently and logically. Instead, he ended up being an annoying outside plot driving device, and not even a very good one.

Man, I really wanted to like this book, because it started out so strong. Every character in the first arc is well developed and dynamic (except for maybe Hugo, but again, that feeling may have been exacerbated by the narrators flat narration/voice for Hugo), the character driven interactions are consistent and interesting, the slow but steady climb of the ensemble’s relationships with each other, Wallace’s journey of finding himself and becoming a kinder person, and the prose and writing style in this part of the book are all aspects I really enjoyed. I wish they would have persisted through the rest of the book, but alas, it kind of fell flat to me. Really a disappointment, after I ended up loving the House in the Cerulean Sea so much.

TLDR: Cool idea, passable execution. Some cool and really genuine emotional moments, with cute and witty character interactions interspersed with unnecessary side-plots and plot-devices where there could have been more focus on inter-character relationships. Strong main cast with sadly mostly annoying and unpleasant side characters.

(Very small Post Script Note that is purely a me thing: I kind of dislike that it is mentioned several times that Apollo was/was supposed to be a service dog, but then it’s never really used. As a service dog owner and trainer I was pleasantly surprised to see a SD in this, but it was so underutilized. I wish Apollo had shown some tasking, or that Hugo had utilized him more rather than just for emotional support. If the explanation for that is that Apollo is a ghost, well, he could’ve just been alive, if the other is that the author might not have much experience with service dogs, then maybe don’t insert them. Hugo could’ve just had a dog. Or a ghost dog.)

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elijah__'s review

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dark emotional funny hopeful 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

5.0

Content Warnings

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