Book Review: Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty

As a Sherlock Holmes fan, I’ve always intended on reading a Liane Moriarty book, for the only (random) reason that she shares a name with his famous archnemesis, Moriarty, a well-known villain in the mystery world. I always wonder; did she feel the need to become an author because of her celebrity namesake? Regardless, she doesn’t need my help to boost her book sales. Her website proudly proclaims she has sold over 20 million books so far, and no doubt her latest Here One Moment will continue that impressive streak. I really enjoyed this book (my first foray into Moriarty, but certainly not my last) so I now see why she’s so popular, and I’ve happily joined the large club of fans she enjoys.

Plot Summary

A plane is boarding, but the flight has already been delayed by a few hours. Once the passengers are seated, it’s delayed for another hour, and the crying baby is starting to get on everyone’s nerves. It finally takes off, and the flight is relatively short, a domestic between cities in Australia. However an older woman sitting at the front stands up, and starts moving slowly down the aisle, pointing at each passenger and predicting their age of death, and cause of death: 32, workplace accident, etc. She doesn’t make it down the entire aisle so some people are spared her eerie prediction, but others are not so lucky, including a few who learn they have less than two years to live. And that previously mentioned crying baby? He’s apparently going to drown when he’s 7 years old. A flight attendant eventually gets the odd woman seated and quiet again, but the damage has already been done. As the book progresses, we get alternative first-person perspectives from a handful of those passengers, psychologically coming to terms with these forecasts, many of them thrown into terror once her predictions start coming true. We also get the life story of this mysterious woman, and the circumstances leading up to the fateful flight.

My Thoughts

Something I didn’t realize going into it (and I’m going to try to keep the suspense up for you as well) is what the actual genre of this book was going to be. This is likely due to the fact that I’ve never read this author before either, so I wasn’t sure what to expect; will this turn into a horror novel where a bunch of people start dying? Or will it be an action thriller, where people hunt down this psychic and plot to kill her? Or, will it be a work of literary fiction, where we all start pondering the meaning of life? I won’t give you the answer, but this is something that kept the pages turning for me – it wasn’t clear how things were going to go, so aside from calling this book ‘suspenseful’ I won’t give away anything else.

It wasn’t just the plot that kept me interested and moving through the 500ish pages at lightning speed (the chapters are short, so it’s not as long as you think it might be). the writing was smart, clever, and entertaining. So much of this book is about people, and how we would all react differently to hearing about our deaths, and the ‘people’ part is where Moriarty really shines. Her characters’ inner thoughts and observations often made me chuckle out loud, and not surprisingly, the women were the most relatable, and vividly drawn:

” ‘Oh, would you look at that, it’s the bride and the young mother! They must have teamed up. That’s nice. Young women are such go-getters.’

‘Thanks Mum,’ says her youngest son.

‘Well, you’re a go-getter too, darling,’ says Sue. (He’s really not. He skates by on his looks.)”

-p.307-308, Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty, hardcover edition

Would men connect with this book as much as women? Likely not, as there were considerably more female perspectives, and at times, the men could be infantilized a bit (in good humour, but still, I noticed it). Does Moriarty have a bunch of male fans? Again, probably not, but I could be totally wrong here. Still, I loved this book; I highly recommend it to those who haven’t read a Moriarty yet and are curious about her success.