ARC Review: Year One by Nora Roberts

Recommended Read!

“I love it, I Love It, I LOVE IT.”
~ Under the Covers

It’s New Year and the world is about to be hit by the Doom, a disease that kills with a 100% mortality rate. However, there are some who are immune and amoungst those immune there are some who are developing powers. Like all power, some of it is being used for good, such as the couple Lana and Max, witches whose magic seems to grow more and more as the world crumbles around her and there are those who use their magic for darkness and destruction. Lana and Max must escape New York as it becomes more and more dangerous for those with magic and try and survive in a brand new world.

Please, I beg you, ignore my terrible synopsis of this book and read the official one, in fact don’t even bother just go out and get this book immediately.  It’s the best book I have read all year, which is making this review really hard to write I’m resisting the urge to just write …. I love it, I Love It, I LOVE IT… over and over again. However, I have, barely, marshalled my thoughts so they make slightly more sense so I can say more than just “get it” and do loads of exuberant hand movements when I trying to say what I adore about it.

The World

I loved the world that Roberts has started to create in Year One, it reminds me of a mixture of the TV series The Walking Dead and the book series The Others by Anne Bishop. It has that mixture of survival in a world gone mad and the terrifying thought that the people around you are more dangerous than the environment in which you are now living. Roberts starts us in a world we all recognise and then unleashes a terrible disease, which seems to have some magical origin, and then shows us the results through different survivors eyes. Then there is the magic and the abilities that people seem to have evolved added to the mix, giving the familiar dystopian/zombie type story line a twist.

I loved it, I couldn’t wait to see what our familiar set of survivors would see and do next. How they could possibly survive in this lawless and seemingly hopeless new world.

The Survivors

This story is told through several different POVs, enough to keep it interesting, but not so much that it becomes dizzying and confusing. Through them you get to know several characters fairly well as you struggle through this new landscape with them. As I’ve already compared this to The Walking Dead, you realise this is a fantastic way to fall in love with different characters, but has potentially tear-jerking possibilities. But, I will say no more about that. Roberts had me invested in the whole group of people and now that I have finished the book, I am just dying to know what happens next.

The Story

Apart from the whole “the world is dying and we need to survive” thing, this series (a trilogy I believe) does seem to have a direction other than “survive”. With magic being introduced into the world there are those who wield it to help and heal and those who use it to destroy and kill. There’s a light side and dark side, it’s very Star Wars, to the extent that there may even be a Chosen One who battles for the light, a Jedi if you will. I love this melding of a fantasyesque type of prophecy with a gritty survival story, its a unique twist in the genre that had me hooked to the page

Conclusion

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating:  I love it, I Love It, I LOVE IT. It’s mixture of action, adventure, magic, survival, a hint of romance, heartbreak and hope. I highly recommend you pick Year One and see for yourself the fantastic journey that Nora Roberts is taking us on.

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[about-author author=”Nora Roberts”]

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