#2 [2025/CBR17] Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty

I've been a fan of Liane Moriarty ever since I got sucked into reading Big Little Lies back in 2015. When I saw that she had a new book out, Here One Moment (2024), I knew I was going to read it. Unfortunately, Here One Moment, is my least favorite of Moriarty's novels. It's not bad, but it did not live up to my high expectations. Fortunately, it did get better once I got past the beginning of the novel.

On a delayed flight from Hobart to Sydney, a woman stands up in a trance and tells almost everyone on the flight when and how they are going to die. The woman is an older widow named Cherry and when she is done, she remembers nothing. But a lot of people on the plane have just heard some very disturbing news, and they have to decide if they believe it and what to do with that information.

A stressed out mom with two young kids learns that her baby son is going to drown when he's seven. A brand new bride and groom traveling in their wedding outfits hear that the bride will die of intimate partner violence in a couple of years. The beautiful flight attendant learns on her birthday that she will die that year from self harm. An 18-year-old is going to die in a car crash when she's 19. A middle aged man will die in a workplace accident after his next birthday. A young man who is already grieving the recent death of a good friend learns that he will die in the next year from an assault. And a delightful, retired couple hears that the wife will die within five years of cancer. (I know planes carry a lot of people, but to have so many upcoming deaths on one plane is more than unlucky.)

The book jumps back and forth between Cherry's point of view, as we find how she came to be on that plane prophesizing everyone's deaths, and a select number of other characters from the plane as they digest and react to this unwelcome news.

There were a number of reasons this book didn't work for me as well as some of Moriarty's other books. First, there were so many characters that it took a while to dig into their actual lives and learn something about them. The beginning of the book is just pages and pages of people on a plane, and I needed more information to find them interesting. In addition, besides Cherry acting like a crazy lady on an airplane, I wasn't very invested in her, so I didn't understand why we were getting her life story. As I got to know the characters more, the story did become more interesting, but it took a long time to get to that point. Also, much of the plot felt like it was just random things being done to the characters--things they had absolutely no control over. It wasn't very satisfying.

Secondly, this was a bad time for me to read a long book where the central theme is death and dying. I have a good friend who is currently on hospice. Death seems to be front and center in my life right now, and I'd rather not focus on it for entertainment as well. I did not choose wisely in this instance.