Under the Whispering Door

 Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune, 373 pages.

Wallace Price is dead. Luckily, this is only the beginning of the story. Wallace is collected by a Reaper and taken to Charon's Crossing, a tea shop that doubles as a waypoint for souls as they prepare themselves to cross over to the other side. The ferryman who runs the teashop, Hugo, is empathetic and handsome, and Wallace quickly finds himself wishing he had found this place while he was still alive. Actually he finds himself wishing he had done a lot of things while he was still alive. Wallace Price had not been, by any metric, a good man. Now that he's dead he's finally learning how to live, which feels monumentally unfair. But Charon's Crossing is only meant to be a place people stop briefly, not a place where they can say, and sooner or later Wallace will have to move on.

I read The House in the Cerulean Sea earlier this year (before I started blogging, sorry!) and this sounded like the exact same brand of soft, middle-aged queer romance, which I liked the first time and was certainly interested in reading more of. This book was, in a good way, pretty much exactly what I expected. It was wholesome and engaging, and the pacing felt pretty perfect. It would be easy to think a book about death is sad, and it is a little, but it mostly isn't. This is an extremely gentle book about grief, and I would definitely recommend it.