Year One by Nora Roberts

 

Okay folks, strap in for this one. I don't really know why I decided to purchase Year One by Nora Roberts. Roberts is not my kind of author and I really should have known better. Now, to be fair, I know this woman is extremely popular amongst her fans and she's published north of 200 novels over the span of her career. She's a huge figure in the world of romance novels and has made valuable contributions that that genre. I don't begrudge her her success at all. Clearly, she's doing something right. Her work is just generally not for me, and I fully knew that as I picked up this book in Barnes and Noble and read the back. The plot summary seemed very promising though. It wasn't a romance novel written for women of a certain age. It was a dystopian novel. There was a pandemic in it. There was magic in it. I thought that maybe, just maybe, this book might one that I would like. So, even though this was an unusual purchase for me, I decided to give it a try. This, as it would turn out, was a mistake.

I didn't realize that right away though, as the novel starts off pretty strong. It begins with a man named Ross MacLeod shooting a pheasant on his family farm in Scotland. His actions inadvertently unleash some dark magical forces and trigger a pandemic called "The Doom" that spreads like wildfire and decimates the world's population. Before a month has passed, millions have died and society has completely collapsed. It's a full on dystopia and the remaining people are doing whatever they can to survive. There are two groups who haven't fallen prey to The Doom. The first is a small percentage of regular people who have a natural immunity to it. The second group of people who are immune (and this is where the story really goes off the rails) are magic users. Magic exists in this universe, although before the illness hit, most people born with it had very limited powers or didn't even realize they were magical at all. Now, however, everyone with the capacity for magic is seeing their powers grow in leaps and bounds in the wake of the illness, and some of these newly-powerful people are turning to serve the dark forces that unleashed The Doom in the first place. A battle between good and evil is brewing, with both magical and non-magical people falling on both sides of it.

The novel follows three main groups of characters as they struggle to survive in  the post-Doom world. Some are magical and some are not. The story takes place over the course of a year and alternates between the groups as they try to find food, shelter, and safety while society continues to collapse around them. The characters that get the most attention are Max and Lana, a young couple that find out they are pregnant just as The Doom is ramping up. They are both witches (yes, really) and can do things like move objects with their minds, perform cleansing rituals when they encounter dark magic, and push people around in fights. Early in the story, we are told that their baby is going to be the person that ends up saving the world, although details on that are left hazy in this volume. You see, Year One is the first book in a trilogy, and the story is entirely focused on how humanity fares in the first year after the disaster and how these evil magical forces are gathering strength. That's it. The story ends abruptly after their baby is born and we have to continue on to book two if we want to see how the story continues.

Aside from the opening pages of the novel when the Doom was spreading and everyone was dying, I didn't like anything about this book. I usually never say this in my reviews. I generally can find a few things to like, or I can appreciate something the author was trying to do. Not so much here. The story felt poorly conceived, nothing was explained clearly to the reader, and the pacing was a disaster. The fantasy elements were so clumsily inserted that they felt like parody. The dialogue, and especially the romantic scenes, induced a level of cringe that I could feel all the way down to my toes. This was 451 pages of mind-numbing boredom punctuated by moments so (unintentionally) ridiculous that I laughed out loud. 

Let me explain some of what I mean here. First, the story itself was under-developed. We've got a clear "chosen one" trope happening, and that's asserted very early on in the story. Okay, fine. We are, however, missing a lot of details about why a "chosen one" is needed in this world. What is the evil this baby is supposed to fight against? We don't really know. Something with ravens I think. How did this evil arise? Something with a pheasant. Why did the rise of evil bring a pandemic with it? *shrug* Why did the unleashing of evil cause the magical population's abilities to increase? *blank stare* This is not an exaggeration. Nothing is explained clearly. Some of the characters think about these questions and start hypothesizing about it, but they don't know either and their theories are very vague. The vast majority of the book is just following the various characters as they wander around looting grocery stores and trying to find shelter. Occasionally, moments of horrific violence will occur too, and these moments feel out of step with the general tone of the story. Things just happen in this novel, and without having a solid base of backstory to hang this information on, it's difficult to feel the stakes behind any of it. Of course, lots of books keep details vague until deeper into a series, leaving readers with a mystery to solve as they read. That didn't feel like the case here. This felt like the missing information was just never developed. I'm sure book two goes into these questions more deeply, but the fact remains that more detail was desperately needed in this book to help the story make sense.

Next, the fantasy elements were bad. I don't have a better way to say it. There were no rules for magic in this universe, and the types of powers people had read like a Halloween roll call. As I previously mentioned, the Doom magnified people's pre-existing powers. What those powers were, though, were varied in a way that made no sense at all. Some, like Max and Lana, were witches (curiously, there is no male version of that word here - everyone's a witch). Some were elves. Some were fairies and could suddenly sprout wings and fly. Some could see the future. Some were shapeshifters. Some could communicate telepathically. Large flying monsters of unknown origin appeared. Magical babies were preternaturally intelligent. Lana's unborn fetus could give her visions and speak to her through dreams. It was too unstructured. There were no passages to lay down any kind of magic system. Even between people that had the same affiliation, like Max and Lana both being witches, there was no consistency to what their powers actually were. Their level of knowledge about their abilities was all over the map too, especially when it came to Lana. She starts off the story with barely any knowledge that she had magical capabilities, and then after a few months of wandering in the wilderness (not training or learning anything), she is instinctually able to conduct rituals to with candles and special speeches. Everything all the characters could do felt like it came out of nowhere. The story lacked fantasy-logic and relied on the least imaginative versions of fantasy stock characters. There was no sense of wonder about it.

Last, I have to mention some of the language. Everything here was cheesy, and I think that's largely Nora Roberts' style, but I couldn't get over one phrase in particular. Rather than saying two characters were kissing, she would routinely say that one had "taken the other's mouth." Something about this made my skin crawl, and it came up a good handful of times. These was another instance where she described a character as having "exotic, Asian eyes," which some editor clearly should have caught and fixed. There were lots of little things like that throughout the text that just bugged me, although those were small potatoes compared to the structural issues I found. 

So, obviously, Year One was not a win for me. I thought it had a lot of story and world-building issues. I am apparently in the minority on that opinion though, as the reviews on Goodreads for this book are pretty good. However, I do think that's mostly due to Roberts' massive fanbase. I would venture to guess that a lot of her fans (1) love her style and, by extension, everything she writes, and (2) aren't regular fantasy readers. People that are big fantasy fans and aren't already fans of Roberts, like me, will probably struggle with this one. At the very least I'm glad that I read it because now I can get it off my shelf and free up some space for books that I will hopefully like better. Every book can't be a winner, right?

Challenge Tally

Total Books Read in 2022: 75