Salvation City

I read "Salvation City" in a single afternoon. I was thoroughly engrossed in the story,, the characters, the ides and the author's beautifully direct prose. I have read a number of "post-apocalyptic" novels lately and "Salvation City" up there with the best of them (notably, Margaret Atwood's "The Year of The Flood"), but it is quite different from most. The "apocalypse" in "Salvation City" is simpler and more straightforward, and life in the aftermath is much less different than in other novels from the pre-event reality. In fact, the flu pandemic in "Salvation City," while setting the stage for the novel, really was not altogether necessary; it just provided a distinctive framework in which to present a contemporary coming-of-age novel. Cole Vining was born to atheists (one of whom was formerly Jewish) is orphaned by a flu pandemic and is fostered, during his pubescence, by an evangelical preacher and his cancer-surivivor wife. As Cole grows into adulthood, he deals with issues of love and loss, faith and doubt, and selfishness and selflessness. The author is remarkably even-handed in presenting the "grist" for Cole's "mill" and, while many of the characters are, she is never judgmental. Rather, she leaves Cole to make his own choices, and the reader to respect all the possibilities Cole considers in making those choices. In the end, the reader is fully in love with each of the characters, accepting all of their wonderful qualities, as well as their significant, but very human, flaws. I was moved deeply. As a result, I will be purchasing and reading other works by Ms. Nunez shortly.

Cole Vining is a young teen that gets uprooted from all he has known to move from Chicago to a college town in Indiana. He has trouble fitting in to the community when a flu epidemic strikes around the world. He contracts the flu, as do all his living relatives and he ends up as the only survivor in his family. Following his recuperation, he is placed in an orphanage for adoption. Services have broken down, chaos has ensued, and the orphanage is unable to cope with all the children, so he is taken in as a foster child by a pastor and his wife. The town where they live is in rural Indiana and different from any place the boy has known. As he transitions into living in a small, rural, highly religious community, things begin to change and suddenly he is faced with a number of hard choices. Generally, I found the book to be thought provoking in some of the situations it presented. Are we, and the country, ready for a massive flu pandemic and what would happen if you were to die suddenly? How would you or your children react to being placed in a completely new situation that you are totally unfamiliar with? There are more questions raised, however I would be giving away the plot if I discussed them. I found the writing, at first, to seem simplistic. The description of the flu pandemic read, to me, like the script from a bad sci-fi movie, yet as the book progressed I was drawn into the story and found it to be gripping and thought provoking. I ended up enjoying the book greatly, and only wished the author hadn't been quite so wild with the description of the pandemic.