Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I like you just the way you are

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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This is one of the sweetest stories I’ve ever read. It’s about difference, exclusion, prejudice, unconventional families, the magic of love and inclusion, which all sounds lovely and perhaps a bit cliché. The thing is, author TJ Klune writes about these topics in a way that is sometimes surprising and always effective. Klune has created a world in which magic and “monsters” exist, and those children who show signs of having magic are separated from the rest of society and put in orphanages run by […]

I’m already dead

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

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Under the Whispering Door isn’t a sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea, even though the covers look so similar–and even though TJ Klune uses the word “cerulean” no less than three times throughout the book, which is three times more than I’ve ever seen it in any other book besides The House in the Cerulean Sea. It felt sort of thematically the same, though–a sweet love story, a redemption story, and one about found family. I think I liked The House in the Cerulean Sea better. Under the […]

“If you see something, say something.”

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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I cannot remember where I first saw The House in the Cerulean Sea (2021) by TJ Klune, but I may have been looking for available audiobooks at the library. It has primarily positive reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and I thought it might be a fun listen during my commute. In the end, I thought it was all right. I liked some parts, but on the whole it felt too long and I was not fully invested in the characters. My favorite part of the book was […]

What will you do with the time you have left?

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

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So….I downloaded this audiobook on Libby, thinking that it was a different TJ Klune. I thought I was borrowing The House in the Cerulean Sea. So I was Extremely Confused to be listening to a story about a real a-hole of a lawyer who dies suddenly but ends up sticking around as a ghost. This is no one’s fault but my own, of course, though it may explain why it took me a while to warm up to this story. Wallace Price is the a-hole […]

Death can’t stop any of these characters

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

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TW for this review and the book: murder, suicide, discussion of death of both people and pets. Author TJ Klune also includes a similar warning at the very beginning of the book which I greatly admire. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s reading more. Maybe it’s just accepting my own emotions, but Cannonball Read has made a liar out of me. Books never used to make me cry. Rarely even tear up. I would feel things, sure. But not cry. That was a response strictly reserved […]

A Sugar-Coated World I’d Like to Live In

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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At first, I thought this book was trying to be Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children with an isolated orphanage housing magical children. But as I joined Linus, the case worker from the bureaucratic Department in Charge of Magical Youth, on a special “level 4” mission to investigate the most unusual of the unusual, I discovered a charming same-sex love story (!). Arthur, the headmaster of the “orphanage” (a euphemism since none of the inhuman children are ever adopted) is a soft-spoken gentleman who cares […]



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