An elderly lady on a plane is having something of a bad day and the other passengers find themselves treated to what appears to be a personalised prophecy of their age and cause of death. The book follows Cherry (the fortune teller), one of the flight attendants and a half dozen or so of the passengers in the aftermath of their encounter. It is an entertaining tale of how people don't really believe in such things but are nevertheless caught up in the hysteria that ensues when a couple of the predicted deaths occur on schedule. The author tempts you to believe with the backstory of Cherry, whose mother used to read fortunes, though she herself has pursued a career based on a passion for mathematics. One woman with a pre-history of OCD becomes obsessed with protecting her son from the threatened drowning; a young couple nearly break up because the husband is terrified he will harm his wife in his sleep; an overworked civil engineer is forced by his wife to escape his all consuming job; another young man dies, but it turns out he was never on the plane and it was all faked for attention anyway; but it was Ethan who I bonded with the most. He is heading home from a friend's funeral and as we follow his story he finds himself grieving far more deeply than he anticipated, and mooning over his housemate, who is clearly out of his league. But what she did so cleverly was to ramp up the tension so that I kept anticipating something bad happening to each of the characters ... and I would curse her. The former passengers set up a social media page to try and track down the woman, who has of course just gone back to her life unaware of the impact she had. Threads are drawn together neatly at the end, with unexpected connections between the people involved. A very satisfying read.
Here is Cherry, reading someone's palm for the first time, she is under no illusions about neither herself nor her mother before her:
"Not believing had become an important part of my identity. After Dad died, I never asked Mum to read my tea-leaves. I swore allegiance to the sensible side of the family. The same side as Dad, Auntie Pat and Grandpa.
And yet here I was, with my hand out, waiting for her to give me hers, and Suzanne did, without hesitation, and I recognised the expression on her face because I had seen it on the faces of so many of my mother's customers: equal parts sceptical and hopeful, a non-believer desperate to believe.
I was strange how easily it came to me. It was strange, too, the sense of power I felt. My breathing slowed and my voice became deeper. Even as I had been scoffing, I had apparently been learning. There was no door to the back veranda where Mum saw her customers, just a purple curtain which she drew to give the illusion of privacy. I could hear every word, and in the first year after Dad died, I lay on the floor on my stomach and listened in, not because I was impressed with Mum's skills but because I was enthralled by the intimate, grown-up details her customers shared about their broken hearts, their disappointing sex lives, their pain, their dreams of something better, something more, something different.
I heard myself telling Suzanne, with absolute confidence, that her lifeline had nothing to do with the length of her life but with the richness of experiences that were in her future, and hers was deep, so there were many, many experiences ahead of her.
All of Mum's customers had rich experiences in their future.
I said her broken heart line suggested she would have multiple partners in her life.
Then I said those words I'd heard Mum say to some women, with more conviction than any of her other predictions.
I said, 'I see you leaving.'
I see you leaving. It's what my mother would say to women who cried into soggy balled-up handkerchiefs while they asked, 'Will I ever be happy, Madam Mae?'
She'd say it over and over, at every reading: I see you leaving, I see you leaving, I see you leaving. Until finally they saw themselves leaving too." (p.294-5)
Stay safe. Be Kind. Think about death occasionally.
