Year One

I have read enough Nora Roberts to expect a certain rhythm: a woman with a wound, a man with a temper, a house that needs fixing, and a happy ending earned through conversation. Year One has the wound and the house, but it also has a plague that kills most of humanity, a witch who levels a town with grief, and a prophecy about a child who will save the world. It is the first book in the Chronicles of The One, published by St. Martin's Press in 2017, and it is Roberts doing fantasy on a much bigger canvas than usual. The result is ambitious, readable, and a little clumsy.

The bird in the circle

The book opens on New Year's Eve in Dumfries, Scotland. Ross MacLeod, sixty-four, is hunting pheasant near a stone circle called sgiath de solas. A wounded bird falls inside the circle, and its blood soaks into the ground. The ward that has kept something out for centuries cracks. His neighbor, Mrs. Frazier, warns him that a war between light and dark has begun and that his grave will be the first.

Ross and his wife Angie fly home to New York, and the plague they carry spreads through the airport and then the world. It is called the Doom. It kills quickly, sometimes within hours, and it does not care who you are. Ross dies. Angie dies. Their pregnant daughter Katie is exposed, and her husband Tony dies within days.

That opening is efficient and creepy. Roberts is good at the ordinary details of catastrophe: the missed calls, the hospitals filling, the news anchors losing their composure, the way people keep behaving normally until they cannot. The Doom is not explained in any scientific depth, and readers who want a plausible epidemiology will be frustrated. It is a device to clear the board and let the survivors discover what they are.

The survivors

The book follows several groups. Jonah Vorhies is a paramedic who can see death coming. He is on the verge of suicide when Katie goes into labor, and he delivers twins, Duncan and Antonia, in a deserted maternity ward. Dr. Rachel Hopman, an immune ER doctor, joins him. They take in an orphaned newborn named Hannah. The four of them become a family on the road, and their chapters are the warmest in the book.

In Brooklyn, Lana Bingham and Max Fallon are a young couple who have been dabbling in magic. When the world collapses, their dabbling becomes real power. They flee the city with a drifter named Eddie Clawson and his puppy Joe, heading for Max's brother Eric's remote retreat in the Alleghenies. Lana is a witch. Max is something else, a man whose gift is tied to light and protection.

Arlys Reid is a journalist who keeps broadcasting as the world dies. Her intern Fred reveals that she is a faerie. A hacker named Chuck tells Arlys that over two billion people are dead, the president is dead, and the military is rounding up the immune. When the anchor Bob Barrett hijacks the broadcast and shoots himself on air, Arlys tells the truth, destroys her workstation, and escapes with Fred and Chuck through the PATH tunnels.

The strands converge slowly. They meet at Arlys's childhood home in Ohio, then at a ghost town they rename New Hope, Virginia. By the middle of the book, the survivors have a community, a council, and a set of laws. The laws are built around the Wiccan Rede: an it harm none, do what you will. It is a nice idea, and the book is smart enough to show how hard it is to keep.

Arlys is the character who carries the book's sense of the outside world. She is a journalist, which means she is professionally nosy, and she keeps broadcasting after the networks collapse. Her chapters have the best tension because they are about information: who knows what, who is lying, who is still trying to control the story. Fred the faerie is a delightful sidekick, and Chuck the hacker gives the group a way to listen to the dying country. The three of them are more fun than the romantic leads, and I wished the book had spent more time with them.

The council scenes are also stronger than the battles. Roberts is good at meetings. She understands that building a town is a series of arguments about water, food, shelter, and who gets to make decisions. The New Hope council includes a doctor, a journalist, a hacker, a witch, and a former soldier, and their disagreements feel like real disagreements. The book's politics are simple, but its logistics are convincing.

New Hope

The New Hope section is the best part of the novel. Roberts is good at communities. She gives you the doctor, the cook, the carpenter, the teenager who turns out to be useful, the difficult neighbor, the woman who cannot stop grieving. The town grows past three hundred people. There are gardens, a school, a power station that Max repairs with his gift. There is a Fourth of July celebration with lanterns for the dead. It feels like a place, not a set.

It is also where the book's romance settles. Lana and Max are already a couple, but the pregnancy and the wedding give them an arc. Their relationship is the emotional center, and Roberts writes it with her usual competence. Max is kind, steady, and a little too perfect. Lana is powerful and scared of her power. They are not complicated people, but they are easy to root for.

The villains are the Purity Warriors, a militia led by a man named Jeremiah White. They believe the plague was a punishment for sin, and they want to cleanse the world of the gifted. Eric and Allegra, Max's brother and his wife, are corrupted by dark magick and join them. The setup is simple, almost comic-book simple, and it gives the book a clear moral axis. It also makes the villains less interesting than the survivors.

The attack

The attack comes on the Fourth of July. The Purity Warriors hit New Hope while the town is celebrating. Carla and Drake Manning are killed. Max shields Lana and the unborn baby with his body and dies. Lana's grief erupts into raw power that flattens the attackers. She takes Max's ring and belt and flees into the forest.

That sequence should be devastating. It is the book's big turn, the moment the community's fragile peace breaks. It is also rushed. Max's death is over in a few pages, and Lana's grief is described from the outside. I felt the loss less than I expected to, partly because Max is so lightly characterized and partly because the book has so many characters to service.

Lana spends about six weeks on the run, half-starved, hiding from Purity Warriors, and dreaming of a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She finds Simon Swift, a former Army captain, who shelters her. Two men come looking for her with a photograph. Simon claims she is not there, then kills one when they turn violent. Lana stays, cooks, gardens, and slowly heals.

Fallon

The last section is the birth. Lana prophesies that Simon's hands will deliver the baby amid storms and lightning. On a stormy September night, she gives birth to a daughter and names her Fallon, after Max. The baby quiets only when Simon holds her. On New Year's Eve, a rider named Mallick arrives. He honors the child as The One and says Fallon will be safe for thirteen years, after which she must train with him for two years to prepare for her destiny.

Mallick leaves three gifts: a candle only Fallon can light, a crystal only she can see, and a teddy bear for joy. Lana moves Max's ring to her right hand, asks that Fallon carry Simon's surname, and affirms Simon as her father alongside Max. Fallon lights the candle with her power. The book ends on that image, which is both a christening and a promise of the series to come.

What works

Roberts knows how to keep pages moving. The chapters are short, the cast is large but manageable, and the apocalypse is rendered with enough domestic detail to feel real. The New Hope section is genuinely satisfying. The themes are clear without being preachy: community versus purity, chosen family versus blood, the cost of power.

The magic system is soft and intuitive, which fits the fairy-tale tone. Witches, faeries, elves, seers, and shape-shifters exist, and the book does not spend much time explaining why. If you accept the premise, the rules are consistent enough. If you want a hard system, look elsewhere.

The best scenes are the small ones. A woman giving birth in an empty hospital. A man teaching a child to fish. A town meeting about a well. Roberts has been writing about families and houses for decades, and those skills transfer well to the apocalypse. The book is most convincing when it forgets it is a fantasy novel and remembers it is a story about people trying to make dinner.

What does not

The book has too many characters and not enough time for most of them. Fred the faerie is a great idea who disappears for long stretches. Chuck the hacker is useful but thin. The Purity Warriors are evil in a way that requires no understanding. The plague is a plot device, not a phenomenon.

The fantasy elements are also underdeveloped. Witches, faeries, elves, and seers appear, but the book does not build a system or a history for them. Magic is whatever the plot needs it to be. Lana's power is grief and light. Max's power is protection. The rules are emotional rather than mechanical, which fits the fairy-tale tone but makes the climaxes feel arbitrary. If a character can do something because she is angry enough, the reader stops worrying about whether she will succeed.

The romance is also rushed. Lana and Max are together before the world ends, and their relationship never has to earn its depth. The pregnancy gives them stakes, but it does not give them conflict. When Max dies, the book asks for grief it has not fully built.

The ending is a setup for the next book, not a resolution. Fallon is a baby, Mallick is a mystery, and the war is still coming. If you want a standalone, this is not it. If you want a trilogy, it does its job.

The pacing also wobbles. The first hundred pages are excellent, the middle is a long stretch of town-building, and the last fifty rush through a battle, a death, a birth, and a prophecy. The imbalance is frustrating because the material is there for a longer, slower book. Roberts wrote a trilogy, but Year One often feels like three books compressed into one.

Should you read it

Read it if you like Nora Roberts and want to see her stretch into fantasy. Read it if you like plague stories, chosen families, and small towns rebuilding after the end of the world. Read it if you are willing to forgive thin villains and a rushed middle for the pleasure of watching a competent storyteller work.

Do not read it if you want hard science fiction, morally complex antagonists, or a complete story in one volume. It is the opening act of a trilogy, and it knows it. I enjoyed it more than I expected and less than I wanted to. The community is the reason to stay. The prophecy is the reason to keep going.

One more note for readers deciding whether to continue: the next books, Of Blood and Bone and The Rise of Magicks, follow Fallon as she grows up. Year One is mostly setup for her story. If you are here for Lana and the New Hope community, you should know that the series moves on from them. That is not a flaw, but it is a shift, and it helps to know it before you start.