Year One: Chronicles of the One, Book 1, by Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts’ Year One: Chronicles of the One, Book 1 (2018) begins with a plague.  A family visiting Scotland accidentally invokes an ancient curse or spell whose contagion they carry back with them to New York City.  A plague spreads across the world and in a matter of weeks five billion people have died.  The opening chapters that describe the spread of the plague in New York City, the gradual collapse of order and arrival of chaos, are at least interesting.  A few groups of survivors decide to head west for a place of relative safety.  The novel spends a lot of time explaining their various struggles, mostly as they argue amongst themselves and occasionally encounter “Raiders” whom they have to fight.  These chapters grow increasingly tedious, melodramatic, episodic, and unlikely.

The real problem with this book is that it’s derivative of Stephen King’s The Stand, which also begins with a plague.  King more horrifically describes the spread of an epidemic that kills off billions of people. We can also sense in Roberts’ book echoes of such novels as Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, and Zone One, by Colson Whitehead. Roberts writes in a crowded vein of novels about apocalypse. 

There’s another problem with this book which distinguishes it from other apocalypse novels but also makes it difficult (at least for me) to take seriously.  As the human race dies off, many of the survivors discover emerging magical (“magickal”) powers—they are fairies, wizards, elves, shapeshifters.  We are told they bring “balance” to a world being invaded by darkness and evil.  There are evil magical characters (“the dark uncanny”) and good (the plain old vanilla “uncanny”). One of the good characters, a witch, finds that she is pregnant with a child whom others begin to refer to as “the One.” As the novel develops its mythology, you can see things shaping up towards an ultimate battle between good magic and dark.  The One has just been born at the end of this novel.  This is unfortunate, because other volumes are to follow, the next in December.  Will there be a series of films? One suspects a franchise has been born. We are told in the last few pages that at the age of thirteen “the One” will attend a school in order to learn how to use her powers.  Shades of J. K. Rowling.

This novel had merits and held my interest but also made me wish for it to end.  There are better books to read, but I know I will read the next volume.