Year One by Nora Roberts

   So, what do you read during a pandemic?  A book about a pandemic, of course! All that aside, there was something eerily comforting about this book.  Maybe because their pandemic is so much worse than ours?   Or the fact that it reminded me SO MUCH of the Stand?  Not sure.

I started this book a while back, when life was still normal.  It didn't hold my attention but I picked it up again about a week ago and here we are.  It's the perfect case of the right book at the right time.  The story is about a collection of individuals who are going through a world wide episode.  The Doom.  The disease is highly contagious - passing quickly and wipes out about 1/2 of the world's population.   Of those that remain, some are what are called "uncanny" - people who have powers. 

The camps of survivors, like in the Stand, seem to quickly evolve into those that are good and those who aren't.  The book follows different groups of survivors at different times, with most of them ultimately coming together at some point.

At the end, Roberts kind of strays away from the Stand feel with the birth of "The One".   I'm not sure how I feel about this development or how it will play out in future books, but I definitely enjoyed this one.  I could really relate to what so many of the characters were going through that it was somehow oddly comforting.  Worth a read.  5 stars.