Book Review: Here One Moment | Liane Moriarty

If you knew your future, would you try to fight fate?

If you are new to Liane Moriarty, I would first ask you what you have been doing with your time? But after that (rude) (and sort of joking) question, I’d tell you that she’s an author who doesn’t fit into one signature genre. Her books have well-developed characters and relationships. All are suspenseful. Some are more of a thriller, others are a mystery, and then there is Here One Moment which I’m struggling to place. Though there is a mystery surrounding the predictions and how it is possible, to me this read as a character study t centering around strangers connected by that flight. Let’s get into it!

What is Here One Moment about?

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed.

Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all.

How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.”

Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable.

A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party.

If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny?

What did I think?

This book is like Final Destination meets Love Actually meets Sliding Doors, mixing the concept of fate versus free will, love, loss, chance encounters, and appreciating life while we have it. Moriarty delivers a complex, thought-provoking story and delivers it with a lightness and fluidity.

I didn’t look at any reviews before reading Here One Moment so I didn’t have expectations going in, other than that I have enjoyed every Liane Moriarty book I’ve read and she delivers well-developed characters and relationships. I think some reviewers thought this might be more of a mystery or thriller than it is. There is a mystery—how did the woman (Cherry) on the plane predict those deaths? And will they actually come true? But really, I was lost in the stories unfolding and the prose. This isn’t a thriller; more of a contemporary fiction. At over 500 pages, I was surprised that the story flew by and kept a consistent pace. I found it funny, charming, heart-warming, and thought provoking. 

The teaser is quite vague so if you only want to know what is in that, stop here. If you’re ok learning a bit more about the story (without spoilers), I’ve got you covered. The book is actually centered primarily around a woman named Cherry. In the opening chapter, Moriarty describes Cherry by her ordinariness. She’s a woman on a plane with no distinguishing features that would make others pay attention to her. She’s not tall, pregnant, dressed in fancy clothing, emotional, or chatty. In fact, Moriarty describes her as “not anything that anyone will later recall.”

Cherry does have something that makes her extraordinary, though. She stands up unprovoked and begins to predict the age and cause of death of a number of people around her on the plane. Some are expected to die at old ages (ninety-two of a urinary disease), others have a tragic prediction (pancreatic cancer), and others are young and unexpected (assault at the age of thirty). Some are bombshells (intimate partner homicide at twenty-five). The passengers react differently, some with amusement, some with concern, and some with anger. Cherry, for her part, doesn’t remember doing this, and is quite mortified by it all.

“I have been told I pointed at passengers while repeating these four words: ‘Fate won’t be fought.’ I was always taught that pointing is bad manners, so I was skeptical about this, until I saw the photo, the one that eventually appeared in the papers, where I was most definitely pointing, in a rather theatrical manner, as if I were playing King Lear. Embarrassing. I noticed my hair looked very nice in that photo. Obviously that doesn’t excuse anything.”

In between the predictions we get vignettes about some of the passengers—why are they traveling on this flight, what is going on in their lives, and what was their reaction to the death predictions? The first twenty-five percent of the book introduces these. Mixed in are Cherry’s reflections on the flight and we begin to learn more about her as a person. Her mother was a psychic, for instance. She was taught never to use that skill to deliver bad news, and that is why Cherry is particularly embarrassed by her behavior. “Sometimes I feel so ashamed I can hardly breathe,” she notes after one particularly stark prediction. 

Cherry is the central character. She’s the only person whose chapters are narrated in first person to the reader. However, she doesn’t dominate the book; the other characters are well-developed and have their own arcs. There are a select few that we follow in the months after the plane. Even for those who are adamant they don’t believe Cherry’s predictions, it still impacts them. They become more vigilant about the areas that were related to their deaths—vehicles, workplace incidents, drugs, health screenings, swim lessons, and mental health. When three people from the flight die in the manner and timeline predicted, tension mounts. Can the passengers avoid their fates?

I won’t spoil the way this wraps up or what happens to the different characters, but they all get interesting and complex story arcs. In some ways, the characters are forever bound by that flight. But rather than a tragedy, it’s changed many of them for the better. They go in for medical screenings they may not have, and they learn to prepare for potential accidents. Some become more aware of their triggers and seek lifestyle changes to help. But it isn’t a positive for all. I think the message of the book is really about the extent to which we let fear limit us, or whether we use it to make changes we may otherwise not have made. 

The very last chapter was wonderful. A perfect little ending to the book, and one that left me with a big smile on my face. I found this book to be funny and uplifting. I cared for many of the characters and what would happen to them. Despite some heavy predictions, Moriarty avoids the bleakness and darkness this type of story could draw. Instead, she gave us a story of hope and a reminder to appreciate life.

From the Publisher

Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment is a brilliantly constructed tale that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. A modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery, Moriarty asks profound questions in her newest I-can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens novel.