In Liane Moriarty’s tenth novel, she once again throws her characters into spontaneous crisis. The book opens with a scene we are all familiar with. A flight delay. The cause doesn’t really matter. It sets the reader up to relate to what starts out as a very common day we’ve all experienced and then abruptly becomes a life changer.

When finally in the air, a fairly non-descript silver haired woman stands up and slowly approaches each passenger to calmly tell them how and when they will die. The predictions seem credible. A toddler will drown as a young child, a man will die in a workplace accident, a suicide, cancer, old age. The passengers we are introduced to are, of course, rocked by this.

It is structured in alternating chapters. We get to know some of the characters on the plane and how they are coping (or not) with this new ‘knowledge.’ The in-between chapters take us through the entire life of the woman who made the predictions.

For me, it was a very slow slog through. None of the idiosyncratic characters were particularly appealing and much of what we learned about Cherry, the woman who catapulted the action, is long and unnecessary. I didn’t think I’d ever finish and just now see the book was over 500 pages. It’s sometimes a good thing that page numbers do not appear when reading on Kindle. Knowing how far I really had to go would really have been disheartening.

The ending should have been a save but for me it was too neatly packaged. The reveal wasn’t worth the trip.

Knowing what has always been inevitable yet unknown is a captivating idea and there are a myriad of ways to explore it. The thought that one day we actually may know our time of death is plausible in an AI future. And would raise many questions about how we choose to live our lives.

It doesn’t take much sleuthing to notice a pattern of books published on the coattails of previous successes. Remember after Girl on a Train, how many girl on a this or that came out? Although in an interview, Moriarty said she originally had this idea while sitting on a plane, I think there is something to having this book follow the success of Nikki Erlick’s The Measure. (https://jantramontano.com/2024/08/18/unveiling-fate-an-evocative-debut-novel/ ) Moriarty calls herself a writer of commercial fiction and with that comes the responsibility to follow popular, best selling storylines that appeal to a wide population.

This is a subject that has so much possibility in fiction. I hope if a slew of new books do come out exploring this, they are more original and unfold at a quicker pace.

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