Book Corner: The Premonitions Club by Gwendolyn Womack

PLEASE NOTE: A review copy of this book was provided by the publisher. For more information about this book, the author, and an excerpt, go to: https://www.gwendolynwomack.com/books/the-premonitions-club/

Synopsis: The future can be changed. The trick is you have to see it first.

When Liv Hall and her friends find boxes of letters hidden in her grandfather’s attic, they discover hundreds of psychic predictions addressed to the Premonitions Bureau, a bureau to investigate psychic abilities that mysteriously closed in 1993. As the group reads decades-old premonitions, they stumble on letters from powerful psychics who mailed in their predictions and then disappeared.

A post online about the found predictions alerts a black ops group in charge of the military’s paranormal research, who will do anything to get their hands on the letters and the psychics who wrote them. Liv and her friends now know too much, and they’re directly in the crosshairs. To survive, they’re going to have to rely on each other and the unlikely help of psychics who thought they’d left the dangers of the Bureau behind forever.

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The Premonitions Club is considered a Young Adult novel, and though Stephen King’s Firestarter I’m sure was not considered YA, I did read it when I was a kid and consider it one of my favorite books of all time (probably explains a lot about me, right?). The Premonitions Club reads as Firestarter for a new generation, and I mean that as the highest praise possible.

The story begins with Liv needing help cleaning out her grandfather’s attic before she and her mother meet with the lawyers for her grandfather’s estate. In doing so, she discovers along with her friends Winnie and Matty the letters addressed to the Premonitions Bureau: psychic predictions, some completely outlandish and turn out to be false, while others being eerily true and indeed precognitive. Other kids come over to help out: Liv’s neighbor from across the street Forester, who then calls his friend Jaxon for more muscle to help move the many boxes of letters. Nebony the popular girl tags along behind Jaxon to make her ex Forester jealous.

What starts as a cool past-time of reading letters of past psychics and finding favorites much like finding a favorite author, turns darker when the unknown psychics of the past turn out to have a personal connection to the teens. There are entire boxes of Verified Premonitions from the best of the best: psychics going under the pseudonyms of The Oracle of Delphi, Nostradamus, and Mad Merlin. It turns out hiding their identities was a necessary precaution. But cheerleader and influencer Nebony doesn’t know this, and a cute little social media post showing the discovery of the letters puts the defunct Premonitions Bureau back onto the radar of a black ops group. 

Much like what Womack did in The Fortune Teller (review of that book here) with tarot cards, each chapter in The Premonitions Club starts with a psychic phenomenon and its definition. It differs from The Fortune Teller in the telling of the story from the different points of view of its YA characters: Liv, Winnie, Matty, Nebony, Jaxon, and Forester. For example, Chapter 6 starts with Winnie (to show who’s point of view the chapter is from) and Winnie happens to be a tarot reader, so the psychic phenomena listed for that chapter is “cartomancy: to see the future through cards.” Some of the psychic phenomena I’ve never even heard of, or I’ve heard of it but didn’t know it had a name, like Chapter 30 told from Forester’s point of view “cledonomancy: divination by overheard words.”

Another fun device of the book was in the ending (no spoilers!). There is a handbook, supposedly created by the titular Premonitions Club, giving guidance on developing your own intuitive skills, like aura reading, numerology, palmistry, tarot and divination, and remote viewing. 

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and there were some twists and turns in it that I didn’t see coming (yes, I know, psychic pun kinda intended here). Once again, Womack intersperses what is known and researched about psi phenomena thrillingly into a fictional tale, doing what she did for tarot in The Fortune Teller for aura reading, remote viewing, and numerology in The Premonitions Club.

I know that people tend to look down upon anything labeled as YA, but I think this book is an excellent read, even if I may not have been its intended audience or age group. Aside it being a fun read, it also highlights the many different varieties of psychic information and ways to access your intuition. If you’ve been with me for a while reading this website or attending the Friday night livestream, you know one of my longest and most-cherished belief: that everyone is psychic. Not a card reader? Maybe you read auras like Winnie (okay, she reads tarot too). Have vivid dreams of places you’ve never seen in real life? Perhaps you’re astral projecting like Liv does (without even knowing). I’ll stop with just those two examples, because again, no spoilers here!

Just read it. I have a presentiment you will. 😉

Blessings,
~*~Hilary~*~
www.tarotbyhilary.com
hilary@tarotbyhilary.com

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HILARY PARRY HAGGERTY is a tarot reader, witch, mentor, editor, and teacher. She has been reading tarot for over 21 years (13 years professionally). She was the winner of Theresa Reed’s (The Tarot Lady) Tarot Apprentice contest in 2011, and has taught classes on tarot and spell-work at The Tarot School’s annual tarot conference Readers Studio and at Brid’s Closet Beltane Festival. She writes a weekly blog on tarot at her website www.tarotbyhilary.com and has been featured in Maxim Magazine and BuzzFeed. She is the author of How to Read Tarot.

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