Rating: 
Summary: A surreal, violent, and engaging thriller going nowhere
Review: I was lent this book to read by a friend, and once I started reading became quickly hooked. The basic premise is compelling enough, and contains some Christian overtones and intrigue. The back cover for example states that a clone from the "Year Zero" has been created who thinks he is Jesus Christ. This depiction, along with the first few dozen pages of an archeological expedition to uncover relics and bones from beneath the hill where Christ was crucified captured me into the story.However, the book quickly veers into a worldwide plague, which kills all in its path. The central character is falsely imprisoned in Tibet, and when he finally escapes, he has a journey around the globe in a world with few survivors and little civilization left. Driven by a desire to find his daughter, and the man who left him for dead in the mountains and falsely accused him, he makes his way back to the US. This is the most intriguing part of the story in my opinion. As the story unfolds the book switches back and forth, with sometimes choppy and confusing editing, between a lab compound in Las Alamos New Mexico filled with scientists trying to find a cure for the plague, and the journey, while the rest of the world dies off. The story of the lead character, desperate and driven through incredible odds and danger with the hope of finding his daughter, is what moves the story and emotion. Sadly though, the author seems to have a naturalistic worldview, and therefore once he opens the Pandora's box of cloning, worldwide plagues, and the Christian faith, he has nowhere to go with it. The result is that the story ends with a pathetic whimper, not with the hope of life. His views of the bleakness and hopelessness of a world without meaning, is what leads to a profound letdown in the story. In the end, it felt like a distant nightmare. Where ones feels jarred and moved by the violence and death, by the search for reunited families and hope, and yet so meaningless in the end that it is quickly discarded. If you like being swept into a story then the book does that well enough to keep you hooked. However, the author is so sadly lacking in any spiritual hope that the net result is disappointment and a tragic ending without meaning.
Rating: 
Summary: Coming soon to a theater near you........
Review: I received "Year Zero" the other day and tore into that evening. I found the story very engaging and easy to read. By the end of the first evening I was finished with almost 200 pages, which is almost half the book and a lot for me to read in one sitting. After working on the book the next day I finished it.
The story was what led me to the book - a natural disaster unearths archeological remains from the time of Christ and at the same time unleashes a plague that is destroying man. The main story centers on a group of scientists in Los Alamos, lead by a teen-prodigy Miranda, trying to come up with a cure and one man's, Nathan Lee, quest to find his lost daughter.
The story held great promise, but for what ever reason the author decided not to explore the whole story. I was almost as if the two main characters lived in complete isolation from the world around them. Very little time was spent on the plague - the driving force of the book. It was just presented as the uber-disease that killed everything in its path. Miranda's father played a major role in the government affairs of the time, yet little of what the government was doing to help people was discussed. Los Alamos had divided into several camps that fought amongst each other and no time was spent on the different groups.
This book reminds me of "The Lost World" by Michael Crichton - a book that was meant to be a screenplay. So much was left not explored in the book that when it was over I was left wanting more. Even then ending failed to capitalize on an obvious solution to the problem of the plague. Of course, one could argue that the obviousness of the situation meant that the twist was to not go that route, but everything else in the book went down that path so why not go to the end?
All and all I was very pleased with the book; I just wish it had been longer and more detailed.
Rating: 
Summary: Couldn't Happen
Review: Sorry, but you can't explore bioethics if you simply haven't got a clue about biology. The book's premis that cloning can result in a full copy of a person, even with growth acceleration, that has all the memories of the person up to time the sample came from is missing the main theme of biology since Darwin superceded Lamark. Lamark thought that organisms could inherit acquired characteristics, just like the author of this book! Not true. The brain changes in response to experience; it is the organ of learning, and while each brain cell has a copy of the individual genome, the genes control how the cell works in response to its cellular environment, not how the brain (or the individual) responds to the environment. DNA does not remember anything or respond to the world differently as a result of experience, it runs its programs just about the same way every time as long as it has the proper biochemical stimulus and raw material. DNA is good at making copies of itself, not copies of the world. Other than that, if the author had gotten the biology right, it could have been a pretty good book. He can write, he just doesn't know much about what seems to interest him in biology. Too bad. A disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: If you liked The Stand, read Year Zero!
Review: This guy is good and getting better. I have read Descent previously, which is also a very good read in a "King-horror" sort of way, but this book gets into some real deep stuff on religion and cloning (there's not much that's more controversial than these issues, is there?). But there's more than horror here. It really puts one's mind to work contemplating these and other science/morality/religion issues. And he's really coming along on character development and depth, something that's woefully and permanently lacking in many of your good thriller authors (your Crichtons, Cooks, pretty much all your legal/spy thrillers, etc.). And Long has a nice smooth style (again, continues to improve), none of that flowery ... like Koontz and others. Limits his text to the tale, but with just the right dashes of realism to take you right into the fantasy and captivate you. I also fervently disagree with one reviewer that this is a "one-hit" author. He's already got two hits now, and we'll see what encore is next. I'm going to go back and read one of his earlier works, though with naturally lower expectations. Writing is a continual learning process, for almost all (excepting the occasional non-fiction esoteric stuff). Though most all writers have ravines and ridges as they create - even King himself I count as having the periodic "dud," though still worthy of reading if for no other reason than they highlight the really good works. But Long is good enough so that both his past and future fiction works are probably all in the "quite readable" category. One little bone to pick:... What...happened to Elise? I mean, I can imagine her fate pretty much (the Ochs/Cavendish fiendish duo, of course, did something atrocious with her), but I think it was someone's inadvertant oversight to miss her actual kill-off scene. Author, editor? HELLO, WHERE ARE YOU? A good question for someone involved, anyway. But all in all, one of the top couple books I've read in the past year or two. This is a book you can really immerse yourself into the wee hours with, and should cause you to at least do a little self-analysis, if you're honest with yourself, on issues like religious roots, cloning, and morality. And it IS heavy, VERY heavy.
Rating:
Summary: Swept away!
Review: Here it is, the ultimate Survivor episode, a thinking person's adventure tale. The writing hooked me with the first sentence, "The wound was their path", and what a path it becomes, full of twists and surprises and Nathan Lee's heart full of hope. I've never seen a book like this, with such wild premises that seem to have no connection, but by the end are woven together so perfectly. On the one hand Year Zero is a novel about the virus from hell, the big extinction event that we think can't happen to us. Then there's the cloning of human lab rats that has echoes of Frankenstein and Brave New World. Nathan's escape through the Himalayas is almost a story in itself, but Long keeps on spinning his web, and somehow, amazingly ties it all together in the end. I started telling the story to a friend, then just stopped and gave her the book to read for herself. This one defies simple description. All I can say is, dive in, and get swept away.
Rating:
Summary: Anticlimatic
Review: I picked up this book because I really enjoyed the Descent. However, this book left an unfullfilled feeling. Long explores too many stories, which don't come together until the very end. Half way into the book, I found myself skipping pages just so that I could get to the end. The book felt 90% introduction and 10% actual resolution of the plot. And once the plot came together and was resolved, it was anticlimatic at best. Long set himself up for failure by introducing so many characters, who at the end seem trivial to the whole story. Pick this book up only if you enjoy very very slow story development.
Rating:
Summary: Ok story, but a deceiving back cover
Review: Just a forewarning to all who are thinking about getting this book, the back cover has you believe that Jesus Christ is Patient Zero, and that he has a large role in the story. Not true. His role, if any, is one of a background character. Other than that, it was an interesting read.
Rating:
Summary: One of the most depressing books I've ever read!
Review: It was all I could do to make myself finish this book. I realize there are some who enjoy apocalyptic books such as The Stand. Usually I don't pick them up, but this one was on an area of concern of mine and my bioethics groups concerning cloning and the misuse of those considered of less worth then others. This book picked up all those fears and ran with them. I read many books for my work, and mysteries for pleasure. This book proved to be neither. It took the worse possible situation and put the protagonists in that situation. It also repeated the horrors of the Medical Holocaust, and the indifference of scientists to hurting others in the name of science. It's not that this scenario is not possible. It is altogether too possible and in just the way that Jeff Long writes about. Long is not a bad writer, but neither do his books deserve high praise. George Orwell 1984 and The Lord of the Flies are great classics (though I really cringed reading Lord of the Flies)...Year Zero will never be that. Though none of us should be complacent or this type of thing will happen, I choose to work on the problems of this type, rather than make money off of the possible horrors that could ensue. This book is not entertaining reading...I will not pick up one of Long's books again... Karen Sadler,
Science Education
Rating:
Summary: Pretty good, but The Descent is much better
Review: I bought this book because I enjoyed the author's "The Descent," and while it is a fairly good book, "The Descent" is much better. With the increasing price of paperbacks, this is one I'd recommend you get from the library instead of buying - if you love it, you can always buy it later, right?
Rating:
Summary: Deceiving advertisement
Review: While browsing in my bookstore, I came up with this book in my hands. In the back cover, the text was the same as one of the editorial reviews stated in this page, the one that ends with: "... and his name is Jesus Christ". So I thought: relics theft, worldwide plague, human cloning, and Jesus Christ all in the same story. These are elements that could make a book great. I Bought it. After reaching the end of the book, I was very disappointed. The back cover text is not true at all. "Year zero" is not an adventure nor a thriller, but more like a philosophical text about a world that was devastated by an ancient plague and the effort by those who were spared to quickly find a cure. Although Long's writing style is not bad, his plot and his characters are dull and boring. After the first 100 pages, which are indeed very interesting and set a premise that could be much more well developed, it's all downhill. There are many books dealing on apocalypse-like and dead-end-for-humanity situations and many of them are better than "Year zero": "The stand", "On the beach" are just two of them. If the editors had not wanted to create an adventure-like atmosphere to this book, maybe I would have set my mind on a different frame-reading, and then I could have enjoyed it much more. As it is, I didn't. Grade 5.6/10
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