T.J. Klune did it again! While the plot of this book was different from The House In the Cerulean Sea, the beauty of the writing and the expert development of the characters stayed wonderfully consistent. I think The House In the Cerulean Sea is still be my favorite book for the year, but this one is definitely going to make my top ten (if not top five.)
Wallace Price has done very little with his life. He has no friends, no children, and an ex-wife who can’t stand him. None of which bothers him until he’s already dead. (Not a spoiler… we learn all of this in the first few pages, and his death is required for all of the events in this book to actually occur.) From his sparsely-attended funeral, he is escorted to a ferryman, a living person who can actually see Wallace and whose job it is to help him accept his death and move on to whatever comes next. But Wallace does not want to prepare for whatever comes next because he has discovered that he is only really beginning to live.
Even though the main character is already dead, I thought it was clever how the book unpacked the idea of what you would do and how you would live if you knew that the end was only a few days away. Wallace was a character who put work above all else and didn’t discover what else might be important in life until it was already too late for him. I thought the idea of developing a character’s morality and humanity only after his death was interesting, and I also enjoyed the slow burn of the developing love story.
All in all, I highly recommend this book, and I can’t wait to read even more from this spectacular author.
Thank you to Macmillan-Tor/Forge and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.