Andie’s Book Club: The Room Next Door by Wendy Walker

I love a good audiobook. I listen in the car, while walking the dog, doing the dishes, folding laundry - you get it. I also have a handful of favorite narrators whose names alone can convince me to listen rather than read. So when I saw Julia Whelan listed as a narrator for the thriller The Room Next Door by Wendy Walker, I was all in.

The Room Next Door follows a small Connecticut town grappling with not one, but two mysterious deaths - fifteen years apart, almost to the day. (Cue dramatic music.) Coincidence, or are the incidents connected? (Louder dramatic music.) And if they are… who’s to blame? (Okay, your ears should be bleeding by now.)

That’s more or less how this audiobook sounded to me. Deafeningly overdramatic.

No, I didn’t see the ending coming, but that didn’t stop the experience from feeling awfully cliché. The setting, the characters, even the dialogue all felt familiar and predictable. And surprisingly, I don’t blame the writing. I blame the narration.

Wendy Walker delicately weaves the emotional fallout of a beloved teenager’s death into the fabric of a small resort town and explores how that loss continues to ripple through the community fifteen years later. It’s an intriguing premise, and the story itself kept me going - begrudgingly. But the overacting by the narrators went through me like nails on a chalkboard.

Still, I’m glad I stuck it out, because the ending genuinely surprised me.

Maybe I’m alone in this opinion. The audiobook reviews are terrific.

But for me, it felt less like a tense psychological thriller and more like an over-the-top soap opera from the 1970s.