Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Yes, it's possible to thoroughly enjoy whole swaths of this novel without ever quite accepting its premise.

Indeed, I could very much enjoy the romance and the stages of grief and the whole personal development bits a great deal, even to the point of giving this novel a full five stars, IF it hadn't been for the truly rough intro.

I'm sorry. If I had started reading this after his death without ever having seen him in action during his life, I never would have had a single issue with the novel.

As it is, it stuck in my craw. Hard. Wallace is a grade-A prick. Frankly irredeemable. No amount of effort put into personal growth, with or without such an enormous afterlife prod, would have made me accept this guy as the wonderfully sweet and impressively open-minded guy in the afterlife. At the very least, I would have been quite happy with a stint in hell and some massive torture for him before some kind of massive sacrifice that MAYBE made him redeem himself in my eyes.

As it was, it was WAY too easy. Grief is never that easy, neither is redemption. And the people in here are WAY too welcoming and accepting... unless they were angels... but that doesn't make Wallace an automatic conversion, either.

Ugggh.

What pisses me off is this: without the opener, this is a wonderfully sweet and precious little novel. Without it, all my objections disappear.

This problem just got under my skin. I mean, seriously, what an asshole. Everyone acknowledged it. Uggh.

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