Book Review: "Here One Moment" by Liane Moriarty

It's June and for some reason I'm choosing to read those books that have been stuck on my Kindle for ages and I've just missed somehow. Unfortunately, Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty is one of them. I can understand why. It's buried within some horror novels I was reading and thus, got lost in the noise. However, I feel like I have partially redeemed myself by eventually getting stuck in. This one had an odd storyline and I apologise for not having an interesting discovery story because I genuinely don't know how I found this one. Nonetheless, it is a pretty good read and I haven't really read a thriller like it before.

The main aspect of the book is centred around a flight on which a woman who is relatively unassuming does something quite strange - she starts to predict the time and method of the deaths of the passengers one by one. She'll go up to someone and say what they will die from and when they will die from it. This is quite a unique idea but one thing I couldn't get over is that one woman was told she was going to die in her 80s and she seemed to think this was young because she is related to a woman who, in her 80s, still plays golf and is relatively healthy. It's a really odd perspective to take on things and I don't think that was very realistic. If you told anyone they would live past 80 I think they would be fairly shocked in a positive way.

One of the strange moments is when she tells the son of one of the passengers that he will die drowning at the age of 7. This obviously leads his mother to take extra precautions as she panics. She tries to convince herself she doesn't believe the woman but all the strange events mean that she's sucked into a world of horrid plausibility. She even states she'd move to the desert if it meant saving her son. In her panic, she even turns to the woman and starts stating that she's absolutely horrid for saying such things. Honestly, the other implausibility is that anyone would listen to this crackpot on an flight and not just put it on the internet for other people to laugh at. I never do such things and I definitely would do it if I was in this position. It's just a really strange state of affairs.

Another strange prediction she makes is about a woman who will be killed by her romantic partner, whilst her romantic partner is sitting right there listening to this stuff. This obviously leads later on in the book to him taking the necessary precautions to make sure he doesn't hurt her. She, on the other hand, is torn between being newly married to the love of her life and looking out for the one thing that women always look out for - whether they will be killed by a man they know. This is a different unfolding than the child who was predicted to drown at 7, it is instead two adults who choose to take the steps they need whilst privately thinking things they won't share to each other.

We have an air hostess who is predicted to die at 28 from self-slaughter. The worst part about this is that she gets vomitted on, she must calm down the passengers and she doesn't have a spare change of uniform all on her birthday. I won't go into too much detail, but it seems like this woman is being pushed to her limit and predicting her death from her own hand was probably not the way of solving her issues. I feel like the air hostess out of most of the characters is probably one of the better developed, I actually felt like I knew a lot about her. She felt real. As there were so many characters, there were definitely some that slipped under the radar. But not her. She was very much an in-your-face persona.

I feel like there is something to be said of the narrative style. At some points we get the thoughts and perspective of the woman making these predictions in an attempt for the reader to realise how plain she really is. She wears a silver brooch, she has small earrings, she is on the older end of the middle-aged scale. One thing I noticed about her is that she kept putting off the idea of being psychic. She claimed that she wasn't a member of these psychic communities and sometimes, her narratives were really curt on these issues. I'm not sure whether I enjoyed reading her as a character because she seemed so unremarkable. I was expecting a bit more from it, but it is the writer's decision and not mine.

In conclusion, I did actually enjoy this book. It was great to see some originality in the storyline, definitely some experimentation with narrative perspective and the idea of fate being brought into a contemporary setting. It worked well even though there are things that slightly annoyed me and for that reason, I would recommend that you too, read it.