Synopsis
FIRST PLACE FINALIST 2009 National "Best Books" Awards - USA Best Books: New Age Fiction " ... Something feels off, not quite right, like a run inching its way up my nylon every time I move." Madison Reeves said to herself the day she boarded a plane for a Bahamas' vacation. Little did she know the prophecy in her own words. After her plane passes through an undulating curtain of lights, mysterious events occur to Madison and other passengers on flight 41, but not until they land do they realize how mysterious life has become. Met by her dead grandfather in this otherworldly airplane terminal hung between the worlds of the living and the dead, Madison begins a journey that enlightens her mind and spirit and awakens something long buried in her heart. Is she in Heaven? No one tells her as she undergoes a deep awakening and understanding in the midst of facing her greatest fears. Whether you're a man or a woman, if you don't cry when you read this novella's surprise ending, go get your heart checked out because something's broken there. From retired Georgia weatherman John Doyle, "Changing Planes, a movie your heart reads ... "
Recommendations
The Celestine Prophecy
by James Redfield
Like Madison's unexpected journey, your protagonist stumbles into a transformative adventure that defies ordinary reality when he travels to Peru seeking ancient manuscripts. Redfield builds that same sense of spiritual awakening through a series of revelations that feel both mystical and deeply personal, with the same undercurrent of 'something's not quite right' that propels the narrative forward.
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The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Sebold, like Brenner, uses the veil between worlds as her emotional core—but she approaches it from the opposite direction, with a narrator observing from the afterlife rather than arriving there. Both novels share that gutting emotional payoff you experienced, where the surprise ending hits because the author has earned your trust through genuine character work, not manipulation.
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The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
This one's a bit of a departure genre-wise—it's magical realism rather than spiritual fiction—but Morgenstern creates that same sense of stepping sideways into an impossible world where the rules are never fully explained. The atmosphere is dreamlike and disorienting in the best way, and like Changing Planes, it trusts the reader to find meaning in the strangeness rather than spelling everything out.
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The Midnight Library A Novel
by Matt Haig
Haig explores parallel possibilities and second chances through a woman who finds herself in a library between lives—structurally similar to Madison's in-between space, but with a focus on regret and redemption. Both books ask 'what if?' and use the extraordinary setting to illuminate very human emotional truths about fear, love, and the lives we might have lived.
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The Annotated H.G. Wells, 3 The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance: A Critical Text of the 1897 New York First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices
by H. G. Wells
A genuine curveball, but hear me out: Wells (1897) explores the disorientation of existing outside normal reality in a completely different way than contemporary spiritual fiction. Like Brenner, Wells uses the protagonist's isolation and displacement to force both character and reader to confront what's real and what matters—it's just done through science fiction rather than mysticism, yet the emotional core of 'something's fundamentally wrong with my place in the world' resonates similarly.
View bookAbout Laurie J. Brenner
Biography coming soon.
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