Salvation City

June 28, 2010
The intellectually rigorous and grimly prophetic latest from Nunez (The Last of Her Kind) initially resembles any number of coming-of-age yarns, except that most adolescences don't coincide with apocalyptic flu pandemics and the rise of insular church-cities. Cole Vining, however, is not so fortunate: already struggling with a relocation from Chicago to penny-ante Indiana and the mystery of sexual desire, the near destruction of the human race (Cole's parents among them) launches Cole into a rudderless future of nightmarish orphanages and angelic "rapture children." Rescued by the charismatic and deceptive Pastor Wyatt, Cole is brought to Salvation City, a Christian Mission closed off from the crumbling world. There, Cole's education will resume with religious indoctrination in place of his parents' secular cynicism, and his evolving sense of self will collide with the corruption and hypocrisy lurking beneath Salvation's sanctified facade. The great success of Nunez's book is that the end of the world is filtered through Cole's imperfect perspective, so that the collapse of society is no more devastating than first love, and deeply felt conflict rages as a young man tries to find something worth preserving in a place determined to obliterate the past.

August 1, 2010

An adolescent orphan finds a home with an evangelical Christian community after his parents perish in an influenza pandemic, in the latest from Nunez (The Last of Her Kind, 2005, etc.).

In this not-so-unfathomable scenario, the American health-care system is woefully ill-equipped to cope with a long-predicted worldwide influenza outbreak. Caught in the chaos are Serena and Miles Vining, bourgeois-bohemian academics forced to leave Chicago for Indiana when Miles couldn't get tenure. Their only son Cole has had a secular upbringing—Miles and Serena scorn fundamentalism of all stripes. When "panflu" suddenly overtakes their small town, Miles dies at home, and after several days of delirium Cole awakens in a hospital, only to learn that his mother has died, as well as his only other next-of-kin, Serena's twin sister Addy, who lived in Berlin. He's sent to an orphanage (the sheer number of newly parentless children has revived the need for such institutions) dominated by bullies right out of Lord of the Flies, one of many books Cole had refused to read, much to his parents' disappointment. Rescued by Pastor Wyatt, a reformed alcoholic turned charismatic minister of a Christian enclave called Salvation City, Cole adjusts gradually to drastically different guardians: PW and his wife Tracy, like most Salvation City families, practice home schooling and exalt only one text, the Bible. Cole is surrounded by endearing born-again characters: Boots, a local radio host, Mason, a disfigured former skinhead with a heart of gold, and Starlyn, Tracy's jailbait niece, considered a "rapture child" marked for early ascension into heaven. Although Salvation City is on full Apocalyptic alert, Cole's domestic life with PW and Tracy is distinctly less fraught than with his parents. (Serena and Miles were divorce-bound; PW and Tracy never fight.) When Addy, not dead after all, arrives from Germany to claim him, Cole has to choose between diametrically opposed social milieus—no longer such a clear choice.

Class, not cure, is Nunez's preoccupation, and she handles it with fine-tuned irony and no small measure of profundity.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 1, 2010

Teenager Cole Vining had just moved with his parents from Chicago to a rural Indiana college town when a deadly flu epidemic leaves him orphaned and memory impaired. Shuffled from a Dickensian orphanage to a conservative Christian couple, Cole finds his muddled memories of his liberal parents clashing with the new reality of life in Salvation City with Pastor Wyatt, a charismatic preacher with a history of substance abuse, and his wife, Tracy. Cole now has a safe, close-knit community around him, but he feels its limitations as Tracy struggles to homeschool him. Then, an unexpected visitor presents Cole with new options and hope for a more balanced future. Nunez (The Last of Her Kind) has a deft hand with her narrator's simple prose as he recounts horrific events and exposes profound questions. VERDICT A good choice for all contemporary fiction readers. Fans of Cormac McCarthy's The Road will find similar themes of a near-future dystopia and the human capacity for redemption but wrapped in a lighter tone. For YA readers this could serve as an alternative to Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon or Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Finally, fans of Robin Cook's and Michael Crichton's medical thrillers might appreciate this as a psychological examination of epidemic.--Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast, TX

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2010
Things come undone with shocking rapidity when a flu pandemic ravages America. Cole, the son of liberal atheists and a smart, self-contained boy who loves to draw and counts explorer among his favorite words, narrates Nuezs sixth gripping novel, one of many recent literary postapocalyptic tales. Adept at matching psychological intricacy with edge-of-your-seat plots, the versatile Nuez gracefully entwines a classic coming-of-age story with a terrifying medical catastrophe and a profound battle between secular and religious viewpoints. The pandemic orphans and nearly kills Cole, who ends up living with a kindhearted Evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a community preparing for the Rapture. Its all bible studies, guns, rapture children, and saved adults, including fiercely tattooed, one-eyed Mason. As Cole emerges from a thicket of grief and the confusion of sexual awakening and recognizes and trusts his hunger for education and the larger world, however damaged and dangerous, Nuez brilliantly contrasts epic social failure and tragedy with the unfurling of one promising life, reminding us that even in the worst of times, we seek coherence, discovery, and connection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)