There was a period of time, just after I’d gotten my first job and suddenly had a lot of disposable income and nothing to really spend it on, that I began a collection of Nora Roberts novels. I don’t think I ever had the one that she pulled from publication (for not really fitting her brand), but I had absolutely everything else I could find at my local Walden Books.
As one would expect from a kingpin of the romance genre who releases at least three books a year, her characters are tropes and her plotlines rather formulaic. At the height of my immersion into her fandom, I could read the opening chapters and tell you exactly how the central pairing would get together, how their conflict would play out, and who would chase who at the end. And you know? I really liked that, because it was a tumultuous time in my life and burying myself in predictable at the end of the day was like snuggling under a warm blanket.
All that to say that at some point, the characters got a little too repetitive, and I took a 15 year or so break from reading anything by her. That might have continued if not for Tomi Adeyemi accusing Nora Roberts in December 2018 of trying to profit off of her success by naming her new book something similar to Adeyemi’s new book. (Adeyemi’s book is Children of Blood and Bone, Nora Roberts’ book is Of Blood and Bone.) That accusation and the successive fallout have been documented elsewhere, but please know that 1) you can’t plagiarize a title, 2) both books were named independently of each other at roughly the same time, and 3) Adeyemi’s book, Children of Blood and Bone, is more popular and probably also a better-written book.
But either way, Adeyemi’s accusation made me look at Nora Roberts’ new series, which is such a departure from my expectations that I had to know more, so I checked out the first book in the trilogy.
Year One (2017)
Written by: Nora Roberts
Series: Chronicles of The One
Genre: Dystopian fiction
Pages: 419 pages (Kindle)
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
The Premise:
It began on New Year’s Eve.
The sickness came on suddenly, and spread quickly. The fear spread even faster. Within weeks, everything people counted on began to fail them. The electrical grid sputtered; law and government collapsed — and more than half of the world’s population was decimated.
Where there had been order, there was now chaos. And as the power of science and technology receded, magick rose up in its place. Some of it is good, like the witchcraft worked by Lana Bingham, practicing in the loft apartment she shares with her lover, Max. Some of it is unimaginably evil, and it can lurk anywhere, around a corner, in fetid tunnels beneath the river — or in the ones you know and love the most.
As word spreads that neither the immune nor the gifted are safe from the authorities who patrol the ravaged streets, and with nothing left to count on but each other, Lana and Max make their way out of a wrecked New York City. At the same time, other travelers are heading west too, into a new frontier. Chuck, a tech genius trying to hack his way through a world gone offline. Arlys, a journalist who has lost her audience but uses pen and paper to record the truth. Fred, her young colleague, possessed of burgeoning abilities and an optimism that seems out of place in this bleak landscape. And Rachel and Jonah, a resourceful doctor and a paramedic who fend off despair with their determination to keep a young mother and three infants in their care alive.
In a world of survivors where every stranger encountered could be either a savage or a savior, none of them knows exactly where they are heading, or why. But a purpose awaits them that will shape their lives and the lives of all those who remain.
The end has come. The beginning comes next.
Only minor spoilers ahead for the book.
Discussion: The most remarkable thing about this book is how like and unlike it is from all the Nora Roberts books that have come before. Roberts has always been one to treat writing a novel like a 9-5, which is how she releases so many books each year. It also means that her characters tend to speak with the same cadence and be, at times, completely indistinguishable from each other. It’s super easy to write quickly if you’re not trying to make 100% unique characters, and that’s always been true of her writing.
Given that, what I’ve always appreciated about her novels is the window dressing with which she surrounds her tropes. For all that she selects from pre-crafted characters, she surrounds them with interesting worldbuilding that definitely speaks to a lot of research on her part, whether it’s running a wedding business or opening a B&B or, in this instance, life in dystopian America.
The world ends in the prologue, an illness that spreads quickly and has an overwhelmingly high mortality rate. They call it the Doom in the book as it’s the Doom of mankind. Those who don’t die are either regular humans just blessed with immunity, or gifted individuals with special powers: witches, fairies, elves, shapeshifters, mermaids/men, etc. All of them were whatever they are before the Doom, but the Doom definitely brought out something more in all of them. Lana, one of the main characters in this installment, is a witch. She can light candles as a party trick, but that’s about it at the beginning, but that quickly changes as the world does.
I haven’t read a lot of recent Roberts’ novels, so I’m not sure how she’s evolved over the years, but I was really surprised by some of the things she brought to the table in this novel. A lot more death than I was truly expecting, even outside of the epidemic that killed 75% of the world’s population. There’s an art to writing a good villain that I’m not sure Roberts possesses. Her villains were evil because they’re evil, and absolutely anything was on the table because wickedness was their only motivation. They rape, they pillage, they kill because it’s fun. There’s a window dressing of religious fervor for one group, lack of resources for another, but it doesn’t really fit their crimes.
This also does not, at all, fit in with the trope-y romance plot lines that I’m used to in her writing. The thing that I thought would happen with the main pairing does not happen, and about 80% of the way through the book something happens that absolutely changes everything in a way that made the ending not entirely satisfying for me. Slight spoilers: that storyline continues in the second book and works much better.
Still, despite its faults, I genuinely enjoyed the book and am now 70% of the way through its sequel, and I’ve already got the third novel out from the library. I need to know how everything works out for these crazy kids.
In conclusion: Even formulaic authors can find an original story, and I think Roberts has here. Not that dystopian novels aren’t saturating the market, but her take on everything, weaving together Irish mythology with a doomsday tale, is definitely new. Her dialogue still leaves something to be desired, but she’s woven together a page-turner nonetheless.
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