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    Salvation City: A Novel
    Salvation City: A Novel
    Salvation City: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    Salvation City: A Novel

    Written by Sigrid Nunez

    Narrated by Stephen Hoye

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    After losing both parents to a flu pandemic that seriously threatens his own life as well, thirteen-year-old Cole Vining is sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a small town in southern Indiana. There, Cole feels sheltered and loved but never as if he truly belongs. Everything about his new home is vastly different from the secular world in which he was raised. As he tries to adjust, he struggles also with memories of the past, a struggle made more difficult by the fact that he had lost his parents at a time when family relations were at their most fraught and unhappy. How is he to remember them now? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? Must he accept what those around him believe, that because his parents did not know Jesus they are condemned to hell? During this time, Cole finds solace in drawing comics, for which he has a remarkable gift, and in fantasies about being a superhero.

    Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is about spiritual and moral growth, and the consolation of art. It is about belief-belief in God and belief in self. As others around him grow increasingly fixated on the hope of salvation and a new life to come through an imminent rapture, Cole imagines a different future, one in which his own dreams of happiness and heroism begin to seem within reach.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 16, 2010
    ISBN9781400188536
    Salvation City: A Novel
    Author

    Sigrid Nunez

    Sigrid Nunez is the New York Times bestselling author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award, and of several other novels, including What Are You Going Through and The Last of Her Kind. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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    Reviews for Salvation City

    3.5/5

    105 ratings26 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I received this book from LibraryThing Early Reviewers program and I wish that I could rate it higher. The story follows a 14 year old boy Cole who is orphaned after a flu pandemic that sweeps through the near-future world. He also get the flu but survives and is now being raised by a Christian pastor and his wife in a small town in Indiana called Salvation City. I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be a dystopian book or a religious book or something else. There is quite a bit of religious/end-times talk from the pastor and people around him. The character of Cole was not very well written. He is supposed to be fourteen but sometimes acts like he is ten and other times like he is much older. The flu supposedly fried some of his brain with the fever so maybe that's the explanation. My biggest issue with the book is that nothing really happens. The most interesting part was definitely the first half when the flu is discussed. After that is over, the story of Cole and his new life seems dull. About 2/3 through the book, a new character appears that promises to shake things up a bit but that fizzles too. I started becoming a little interested in Cole towards the end of the book but I was left hanging with no resolution of the odd plot lines at the end of the book.
    • 2/5
      Cole is just a young boy in a small city in Indiana (though he and his parents had, until recently, lived in Chicago) when the flu pandemic hits. It hits so hard that big cities like Chicago become nightmare zones. And even little cities like the one he and his parents are living in cannot help but succumb. Cole has all the usual challenges of any 10 or 11 year old boy — difficulty with bullies at school, embarrassing bodily maturation, parents whom he thinks just don’t understand him. But then this. People are dying everywhere. Even in his own home. Although Cole survives, he goes from one strange and nightmarish environment to another. First to an orphanage and then to Salvation City with a couple who would like to adopt him. It’s a very strange world.Sigrid Nunez so accurately describes the fallout of a worldwide flu pandemic that you’d be forgiven for thinking this was written in the past couple of years. It wasn’t. It was published 10 years before COVID. But obviously everything that happened recently was entirely predictable. This makes the first section of the book eerie in the extreme. But then the shift to a Christian religious community in the remainder of the book is equally eerie, or at least it was for me. It’s not always clear what Nunez is aiming at here. Which may explain why the book just drifts off in the end. As though she ran out of steam and just needed to end it. Of course maybe I’m missing something.Parts of the book are very well written and a few of the characters do stand out. But overall it seems like a missed opportunity. So I don’t think I would really recommend it.
    • 4/5
      Maturing During a Pandemic

      In Salvation City, National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez imagines a global flu epidemic, the toll it takes on a 13 year-old boy left alone after the death of his parents, and his adjustment to and lessons taken from an evangelical pastor and community he comes to live with. Published in 2010, Nunez most probably wrote the novel during the 2009 H1/N1 flu pandemic that ultimately killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide. While this event stays mostly in the background of her coming of age novel, early on she vividly describes enough so we see, looking back, that it portends the problems we currently face addressing the coronavirus pandemic, which as of this writing is approaching 1,000,000 dead worldwide, 200,000 of which are in the U.S.A. (likely, these figures are on an order higher, as will probably be shown a few years from now). Often we hear people, especially those in the present U.S. government, claim that nobody could have known such a pandemic could occur as justification for the massive death toll. But past events and numerous novelists, including Nunez, put a lie to this claim. About the only consolation we can take is that it is not nearly as devastating as the one in the novel.

      Cole is a quiet kid, without many friends, with a love and skill at drawing, and with parents who most will consider a bit iconoclastic, particularly with the American penchant for religion. Which adds irony to the novel, when, after they succumb to the flu, and Cole wins his battle against it and also survives life in a mismanaged orphanage for displaced children, of which there are many, he finds himself in the home of a fundamentalist pastor who prefers to be called PW and his younger child-like and subservient wife Tracy. Nunez gives evenhanded treatment to PW and others in the religious community of Salvation City, using their beliefs about morality and condemnation to enhance the maturation trials of young Cole. As you might expect, Cole has lots of problems with his parents, added to a sense of abandonment, which he has to resolve. Awkward at first in PW and Tracy’s home and the community, he comes to adopt them as his surrogate family. He does suffer some disillusioning episodes, such as that with the “it” girl of the community, Starlyn, but also some inspiring encounters with strength of character and second chances, which he learns from PW, who in many ways functions as a better father than his own had been. As you would expect, he progresses from a confused, tormented, and rudderless boy to one who finally begins to come to terms with his parents, events, and the direction he wants to head in.

      Nunez writes with clarity and compassion for Cole and his new family so that you will care both for the boy and a community often dismissed or caricatured in contemporary literature. With regard to coming of age novels and family sagas, especially those set against particularly trying backdrops, you’ll find this among the best. And the pandemic adds relevancy for today’s readers, another plus.
    • 3/5
      After losing both parents to a flu pandemic that seriously threatens his own life as well, thirteen-year-old Cole Vining is sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a small town in southern Indiana. There, Cole feels sheltered and loved but never as if he truly belongs. Everything about his new home is vastly different from the secular world in which he was raised. As he tries to adjust, he struggles also with memories of the past, a struggle made more difficult by the fact that he had lost his parents at a time when family relations were at their most fraught and unhappy. During this time, Cole finds solace in drawing comics, for which he has a remarkable gift, and in fantasies about being a superhero. Publisher summaryMore coming of age than post-apocalyptic. Everything is filtered through Cole's heightened self-awareness and social paralysis. It's not so much that a flu pandemic is decimating world population but that it deprives Cole of his parents at a particularly low point in their relationship. Later, living with his adoptive parents in the all Christian Salvation City, Cole obsesses over his relationship with Pastor Wyatt. Later he obsesses over the lovely Starlyn whom he loves from afar. When the reader does hear about the world beyond Salvation City, it is through panicked statements like "It's not safe to go outside in Chicago"made by his aunt who wants him to live with her in Germany where, she says, health care and education are far more advanced. Cole is a well-drawn character; I found it easy to connect with him. But why set his story in a post-apocalyptic landscape? He could have been orphaned and adopted by a fundamental Christian couple in a contemporary setting. 7 out of 10 Recommended to readers who enjoy coming of age stories and psychological fiction.
    • 4/5
      Just to be clear: this is really a four star book, but it's been so under-rated that I felt the need to over-rate it. It's much closer to 5 than to 2, or even 1, as many people rate it.
      Continuing the clarity: this is not the second coming of the Jericho TV series or McCarthy's 'The Road,' or any other post-apocalyptic thrill ride. It's a lot like a Marilynne Robinson novel. Like Gilead, it's beautifully written and doesn't resort to contemporary prose cliches like verb-less sentences and so on. In fact, the best thing about this book in my opinion is the narrative voice that she constructs. Mainly it's perfectly clear and controlled, but whenever a superlative is called for, the voice starts to sound more like a teenager's (which the protagonist is). It's odd the first couple of times, but quickly seems natural, even perfect.
      That aside, this is basically a coming of age novel set in a world that is itself coming of age in a very traumatic way, full of great characters and an intelligent depiction of post-Culture Wars America. Cole's parents are knee-jerk liberals, then he's adopted by knee-jerk religious conservatives. He lives with the stupidities and kindnesses of both groups. Can he move past the stupidities and retain the kindnesses?

      Literary Criticism alert! Plot spoilers! Danger below!

      Although only English majors will care, I have a hunch that this is meant to be an allegory for America. As I said, Cole is coming of age; he was born of liberals, like the U.S.A.; he grows up with conservatives, like the U.S.A.; it's unclear whether he'll manage to synthesize them or move past them or develop into something new himself. The book does end on a hopeful note, but it's certainly not an overwhelming hope. In any case, this book will reward close readers as well as people looking for a good emotional roller-coaster and insights into the process of growing up.
    • 4/5
      This is the first novel Sigrid Nunez has written from the point of view of a male character and, while she does a great job, there are so few fiction writers that are as good as she is at writing female characters that I felt a little sad to be missing out on that aspect of her work this time around. But so what, right? She is a writer and her job is to tell stories and this proves that she is getting better at it all the time. Salvation City takes place after a flu pandemic that wipes out a bunch of people. Cole is a teenage boy whose parents die. He ends up living with some wing nut Christians who want to raise him in accordance with their belief system. He tries it out for awhile. A bunch of stuff happens to make him understand how the world actually works and he grows up some. Watching Take Shelter and then Melancholia sort of reminded me of Salvation City...maybe cross that with Naked if it had been created by Flannery O'Connor instead of Mike Leigh.
    • 3/5
      What could have prompted [[Sigrid Nunez]] to write such a bizarre book? Part of the book is about apocalypse, a flu pandemic that effects the whole world, none so much as the US with its spotty health care system - which leads to the dichotomies of the book. There are the intellectual Jewish atheist feminists who are in complete denial about the dangers of the disease. There are the standard patriarchal gun and bible loving, education indifferent, homophobic fundamentalists who truly love people. And there's poor coming of age Cole, full of rage, guilt and hormones. It takes almost half the book to set the story up, and before the end of that time I was getting pretty bored and had read just about all of Jesus I could stomach but the second half finally engages. It's a strange book with a good ambiguous ending. I'm not sure I'd recommend it because of the middle slog, but now that I'm done I'm glad I read it.The book is quite topical with the recent news about Christians trying to gather up orphans around the world, sometimes illegally. The commentary about the US health care system, distrust of the government and the US push toward home schooling was also up to date and provocative.
    • 4/5
      A sparely written post-pandemic dystopia. By focusing on the experience of a teenage boy in what seems to be the very near future, Nunez keeps the story of a 1918-like flu simple while amplifying its horror. The protagonist, Cole Vining, goes from living with literary, well-educated atheist parents to foster care with Evangelical Christians after a stop at a hospital and scary orphanage. To her credit, both groups the urban academics and the rural religous come out looking like flawed but essentially decent people. I do feel like it sputtered out toward the end, but overall this worked as both a character-driven novel and subtly terrifying apocalyptic scenario.
    • 4/5
      After thirteen-year-old Cole Vining lost both parents in a flu pandemic, he was taken in by Wyatt and Tracy, a young evangelical couple living in Salvation City. Cole's family had only recently moved from Chicago to southern Indiana when the pandemic hit. Cole had been sick, but survived, although he suffered some memory loss. Since he had no other family, he was placed in an orphanage with scores of children who suffered a similar fate. Pastor Wyatt (PW) and Tracy, unable to have children of their own, felt called by God to provide for an orphan.Salvation City is an evangelical community that sprung up around the church. Their fundamentalist beliefs and values are foreign to Cole, whose family did not practice religion. Prayer is a regular part of life, and he is home-schooled by Tracy whose own education did not adequately prepare her for this role. But he is well cared for, even loved. As Cole recovers, his memory also returns and the reader learns more about his parents, their awful deaths, and the social and economic havoc resulting from the pandemic. Cole also begins to see PW and Tracy in a new light, as human beings with all the usual flaws. He is then faced with situations that cause him to question the prevailing values in Salvation City, his own beliefs, and what he wants from life. While Cole's personal drama was interesting, I found descriptions of the pandemic most realistic and disturbing. In the abstract, it's easy to assume that if a real pandemic struck everything would work out. But in this book, medical supplies ran out, food was scarce, and healthcare professionals simply couldn't keep up. Some people died because of the flu's severity, but many more died simply because they were unable to receive care. People who failed to take preventive measures early were most likely to suffer. I was struck by just how probable it all was. And one day while I was reading this book, my husband coughed and I nearly panicked, thinking he might be afflicted. The book felt that real.While something about Cole's story fell a bit flat at the end, this was a chilling story that will stay with me for a while.
    • 3/5
      kinda boring. author didn't seem to know how to end it.
    • 4/5
      The writing just draws you in. I would have finished it in one sitting if I hadn't had to go to sleep!
    • 3/5
      Salvation Cityby Sigrid NunezI received this book from Library Thing as an Early Reviewer copy in exchange for a review.A 13 year old boy, Cole Vining becomes orphaned when a flu pandemic devastates the world and hits the U.S.A. especially hard. Losing his urban atheist parents, he is adopted by Christian fundamentalist preacher Pastor Wyatt, and his wife Tracy who live in Salvation City, Indiana.This story revolves around the adjustments Cole has to make from his former secular lifestyle to a religious rural one, as well as growing up and handling the difficulty of being the sole survivor of his previous family unit. The author explores the complications that arise for a young boy to learn to adapt to his new surroundings and at the same time find his way in this new life. Some of the situations are hilarious beyond belief. An example would be shingles that led to alcoholism.Through sections of the book, I was tempted to put it down, but am glad I preserved and finished the book. In the end it was thought provoking and made you examine the differences in our culture today.
    • 1/5
      I just could not get into this book. Did not finish.
    • 4/5
      Both of Cole's parents died in the flu pandemic that caused havoc all over the world, but especially in the US. He recovers and is rescued from an orphanage by a childless minister and his wife and taken to live in the small town of Salvation City. The book moves between Cole learning to live in this new environment and his memories of life with his atheistic parents. What makes this book so interesting is less the new, dystopic world Nunez creates, but in her examination of religious belief. She manages to look critically at both fundamentalist belief and liberal atheism without making either out as good or bad. It's a nuanced performance and very honest. The story itself is fairly simple and while the ideas are complex, they're ones that anyone who has seriously considered their religious beliefs (or lack of same) has already considered. The book does read like a YA novel in language and presentation. The story itself is very easy to read, even as it made me think and think and think. My one criticism of this book is that, at the end, Nunez drastically changed the behaviors of a few of her main characters, giving Cole an easy out to the dilemma he faced. It just didn't fit and felt like she was trying to get the book somewhere it didn't want to go. Despite that, [Salvation City] is a book well worth reading, and enjoyable too.
    • 4/5
      Cole is living in a world ravaged by disease. In a future not far removed from our own, all hell has broken loose and a pandemic flu virus has decimated the world population. After having lost both his parents to the illness and barely surviving it himself, Cole is placed in an orphanage and forgotten. But just when he's started to give up hope, he begins to receive visits from an evangelical pastor who wants to take him home and arrange for an adoption. Cole's parents having been fierce atheists, he knows nothing about organized religion and so finds himself at a crossroads in relation to his spiritual leanings. Though Cole is initially skeptical and cold, he does leave the orphanage with Pastor Wyatt and comes to value life in the small community called Salvation City. Pastor Wyatt acts as a loving father to Cole and his wife, Tracy, also takes him into her heart. Cole is home schooled and begins attending worship services and learning the bible in a perfunctory way, creating relationships in a town that seems to have escaped the more dire consequences of the pandemic. But although Cole is outward happy in this setting, he can't help the anger and fear he feels as an adolescent in flux, and when a visitor to Salvation City comes looking for the forgotten boy, Cole has to decide which path he will eventually walk. Will Cole stay with the loving pastor and his extended family, growing up to be a fixture of the church? Or will he take his chances in a world far different than the one he's known, essentially giving up his safety for his freedom? Sigrid Nunez explores these complicated issues in Salvation City with sensitivity and clarity, leaving readers to puzzle out the complexities of a new world scoured by infirmity and madness, where nothing is as it once was.This is the second YA1 book I've read in as many months, and while I like getting a feel for the genre and think YA books hold a lot of appeal to me as a reader, this one didn't meet with as much success as the first book I tried. I really liked the premise and the storytelling and felt that the plot posed a lot of interesting questions to the reader, but one thing that definitely rubbed me the wrong way was the unending angst of the protagonist, Cole. I've said before that I don't deal well with too many angst issues in the books I read, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I have two teenagers at home and I get my recommended dose of angst daily, thank you very much. Too much angst isn't edgy or complicated, it's just tiresome. When it's repetitive, like it is here, it can be frustrating to read.In a series of flashbacks, we meet Cole and his parents. Cole is unendingly angry with them for all sorts of reasons that I could never quite fathom. He doesn't want his mom to hug him or his dad to take an interest in the things he does. He hates to read books. When the pandemic hits, Cole is left with even more anger then before and becomes a ward of the state as an orphan. There was never sufficient explanation as to why Cole was so angry; he just was, which was frustrating. At times I could accept this anger as the due process of being a teenager, and at times Cole's anger was justified. The problem was that for most of the book, he veered from ambivalence to anger in a way that I found grating. In later sections, Cole becomes a more understanding person and starts to let his heart open to the possibility of love that Pastor Wyatt and his wife want to provide, but by that point, I was annoyed with Cole and couldn't get in line with his new transformation.This book deals very with religion and spirituality in a very interesting way. The residents of Salvation City are spiritual people but they aren't goody-goodies. They have the same problems as everyone else does and they deal with them in much the same way. Though at times they can be naive, they are, on the whole, well adjusted and decent people. There is some talk of Pastor Wyatt engaging in acts of aggressive proselytizing, but for the most part, he's just a man who wants to do the right thing and be good to those around him. As Cole becomes closer to him, he finds in Pastor Wyatt a man that he comes to feel is a father to him. Later, Cole begins to find this relationship suspect (no surprise there) and feels that he may have been misled by the pastor and his wife. This spurs him to think about leaving Salvation City behind for a chancier future. This is another thing I didn't really understand. Cole seemed to be happy and was adjusting well, and then all of a sudden, he takes a different viewpoint. I'm well aware that this shift in attitude came from a visit from an unexpected quarter, but it seemed simple to see that Cole was living a good life and was very loved by the people around him. Why did he want to leave all that? Again, I blame the angst.There were some points on which I understood what Cole was going through. When he begins to question a God that would let his mother and father perish because they were not saved, I could empathize with his fear and confusion. What afterlife awaits those who are not believers? I've asked myself this question many times, and found that I was just as worried and apprehensive when Nunez explored this issue as when I had studied it on my own. It's a tough thing to confront the gray issues of your spirituality and Nunez does this exceptionally well. I didn't get the feeling that she was making judgements, just exploring issues that seem to be difficult for a lot of people to understand. I have to say that I'm of the mind that the God I believe in doesn't make those kinds of distinctions, but again, the logic behind these questions seems valid to me.While I had some very troublesome issues with this book, I feel that the writing and subject matter were presented very well. Aside from my reactions to Cole, this was a book that made me think about some rather interesting issues regarding religion. I wouldn't exactly call it dystopian literature, as it's packaging suggests, and would have to say that this book was more of a character study. So while there was a lot going on, it really felt more of a character driven read than a plot driven one. If you're not troubled by the angst that so clearly seems to be a problem with me, you might enjoy this read.1 The author asserts that this is not a Young Adult title. Noted.
    • 4/5
      Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez is an enigma of a book. It is a coming of age, spiritual, and apocalyptic story without really being any of these. It centers around Cole, a young boy orphaned during a cataclysmic plague in an America of the near future. I found the first half of the book riveting, chilling, and effective, primarily because the first part of the book deals with the collapse of America as we know it from the eyes of a dependent child who sees his life, security, and all that he loves stripped away from him. This part of the story made a huge impact on me; I found I was living his life and experiencing his confusion, distress, and adaptation to radically changed circumstances. The breakdown of society from a child's perspective was powerful and effectively written. The second half of the story, though, lost direction and effectiveness. It meandered through Cole's post-apocalyptic life without any obvious point, introducing characters and situations which promise to be crucial and then sputter out. I kept waiting for these threads to be wrapped together but they never were. I found it very frustrating because the first part of the book was so powerful. I wish I could rate this book higher because it started out so promising.
    • 3/5
      Set in America’s heartland in the near future, Salvation City recounts the story of Cole Vining, a boy orphaned by the recent flu pandemic that killed millions around the world. Adopted by Pastor Wyatt (an evangelical pastor) and Tracy (his wife), Cole must start life anew in an unfamiliar culture. Where previously, Cole’s parents encompassed the liberal ideologies of modern urban residents, his adoptive parents lean to the Christian Right, encouraging him to begin a relationship with Jesus so that Cole might be saved.Although Cole comes to appreciate the parenting of Pastor Wyatt and Tracy, he struggles with the ramifications of their salvific claims. If eternal life exists only through a relationship with Jesus Christ, Cole reasons that his parents must be condemned to hell. Yet Cole remembers his parents fondly. How could God be so cruel letting his parents die before they move toward to a belief in Jesus?As the title indicates, this theme of salvation permeates the book. What does it mean to be saved? Is the loving God discussed in Pastor Wyatt’s sermons capable of simultaneously being unloving? Is the salvation formula as simple as saying a prayer or as difficult as living justly in the world?While the overarching theme intrigued me to read this book, the page-to-page storyline is sorely lacking. For starters, Salvation City contains no chapters. It is, instead, divided into five sections resulting in extremely long blocks of text. Very little time is spent detailing the dystopian post-pandemic world. Aside from mentioning how people contracted the sickness in the first place and characters carrying guns when they go outside, most of the book seems simply ordinary. Lastly, the conclusion of the book is abrupt and hard to follow.Sigrid Nunez presents some big ideas in Salvation City, but she lacks execution. The book is slightly entertaining yet mostly average; I encourage you to look elsewhere.Originally posted at wherepenmeetspaper.blogspot.com
    • 4/5
      There is something very compelling about Sigrid Nunez's newest novel, Salvation City; I know there is, but I can't quite put my finger on why it's so compelling. I do know that you will keep turning the pages. The protagonist is a young boy, Cole Vining, and the action covers his life mostly between the ages of 12 and about 15. He is a very likeable kid, an innocent in many ways, with some strong echoes of Holden Caulfield, struggling with his own budding sexuality and also trying to figure out, under extremely trying and traumatic circumstances, what life is really all about and how he should live his. The story is set in the near future, in a kind of post-apocalyptic Midwest following a world-wide flu pandemic, which has apparently wiped out enormous numbers of people, perhaps millions. Cole's parents were among the dead and he had been seriously ill himself, but managed to survive.I call it the "near-future" because there are references to things that were in the news just in the past few years - the "subway superman" story, as well as the "miracle on the Hudson" plane landing by Captain Sully. There are refences in the story to the "elbow bump" adopted in lieu of a handshake - an attempt to prevent the spread of germs and flu. Which sounds a lot like the way schoolkids were taught to cough or sneeze into their crooked elbow, rather than into their hands, during the H1N1 flu scares of the past couple years. And since I was reading this book during the start of flu season its theme and setting seemed even more ominous.The pandemic has passed by the time the story opens, but the widespread effects of it have yet to be resolved. Social and civic services have been seriously disrupted, thousands of children have been left orphaned, in some cases roaming the streets, thieving and living by their wits, often under the control of an opportunistic adult - in other words, "Dickensian" conditions prevail, both in public and also in the many orphanages that have been quickly set up. Lawlessness and crime are rampant, particularly in the larger cities, like Chicago, where Cole and his parents had lived not long before the pandemic. Cole, who spent some time in hospitals and also in the "Here Be Hope" orphanage, is finally taken into the childless southern Indiana home of Pastor Wyatt and his wife Tracy, fundamentalist bible-thumpers, who believe in "the Rapture," and that the end of the world is near. Wyatt, or PW, as Cole learns to call him, is a curiously benign and charismatic mixture of a man, who has gone through some hard times himself. Indeed, having survived the pandemic, he is later stricken with a particularly painful case of shingles, which tests his faith. But, like Job, he continues to believe, and tries his best to be a good surrogate father and a Christian example to Cole, whose real parents were atheists and intellectuals (his mother was Jewish). It would have been easy, I suppose, for the author to portray the fundamentalists of the Salvation City Church congregation as ignorant and small-minded, but Nunez does not do that. Instead, Wyatt and Tracy and other members of the sect come across as fully realized and complex characters, simple folks who seem to be doing the best they can with the hands they've been dealt.Nunez makes passing reference to the classic sci-fi film, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and how a teacher had once told Cole how the film was proof that "you didn't need to show a lot of violence to make a great scary movie." Well I remember that film too and how it gave me nightmares after seeing it as a kid. Salvation City is like that old movie. There is no real overt violence here - the sickness and death, the fear, terror and brutality all happen "off screen" or "off stage" as it were, like the old Greek tragedies. Even so, I kept thinking of other post-apocalypic books I'd read years ago, works like H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds or Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. And the chilling portrayal of how grossly unprepared the U.S. government was for such a pandemic is frightening enough in itself.Cole Vining is, as I said earlier, a good kid, someone you'll root for. In the end, you know he will figure things out. He will, somehow, make right choices. There is a feeling of hope, finally, in the last pages, as Cole contemplates his future, having decided he must stay in school, get a good education. And "when he thought about what lay ahead, all the adventures and discoveries waiting for him, he felt full to the brim with excitement."Another reviewer likened Cole to a latter-day Huck Finn. Maybe he's right. Because by the story's end, Cole is poised, thinking about "lighting out" on his own soon, but perhaps in this case, it will be "from" rather than "to" the territory that is the outside world. Salvation City has served its purpose. Cole has been saved. Now it's up to him to make a life.This is a very thought-provoking read. It will stay with you for a long time.
    • 4/5
      Salvation City explores the experiences of a maturing boy named Cole who, during a worldwide and devastating flu pandemic, loses both of his parents and finds himself taken in by Fundamentalists. Here he struggles through the emotional rollercoaster of puberty, all while trying to come to terms with the loss of his parents and his newfound family and Christianity (his parents had been atheists.)The narrative of the book was at times hard to follow, jumping quickly between the past and the present. While this was sometimes distracting, it served a purpose and allowed the reader to experience the mental and emotion confusion of the book's main character, Cole. The narrative also tended to lapse from what could be interpreted as the consciousness of Cole himself and that of some other unamed narrator. This, however, did not appear to enhance the story as much as it detracted. The characters themselves are well crafted. Even the minor characters that made brief appearances throughout the story were described in a way that made them real people full of substance and weight. Nunez was able to draw these characters out of the narrative in and effortless and natural manner, so much that I can fully believe these characters are out there somewhere living their lives and carrying on the story.While the book tended to end rather abruptly, the last few pages wrapped up the story in a satisfying and hopeful way. I left the book with confidence that the characters, through the evolution of Cole from a scared and conflicted orphan into a healthy minded and balanced individual, would be able to endure the tribulations set before them in the last portion of the bookWhile I may not have rushed home from work to pick up from where I left off the night before, and while I was able to read only 20 or so pages in a sitting and not feel compelled to continue, the book was enjoyable, the characters believable, and the ending satisfying. This is a good book to read when you don't have time to read a really good book.
    • 4/5
      Salvation City is about an adolescent boy, Cole, who survives a world wide pandemic. Unfortunately for him, his atheist, left-wing, ethnically Jewish parents do not, and he ends up living with a right-wing, Christian fundamentalist preacher, Pastor Wyatt, and his wife Tracy. The novel centers around Cole's struggle to find his own identity despite his two sets of parents, whom he both loves. A healthy dose of adolescent hormones and a desire to be a comic book artist are thrown in for good measure. The biggest issue that I had with the book was that the author, Singrid Nunez, appears to live in a black and white world in which there are no shades of gray. Many characters are introduced in the book, but they all fit within the left-wing, city dwelling, atheistic liberal versus right-wing, rural, fundamentalist Christian paradigm. I cannot recall one character in the entire book, outside of Cole himself, who falls anywhere the middle of this cultural spectrum. Everyone is at the extremes. If Nunez's point was to show people from both backgrounds how the other half lives, she completely misses the boat. Her characters read like cardboard cut-out stereotypes of the way the media presents red and blue states. There is no purple in this book.On the other hand, Salvation City does make for a nice, quick, engaging read. It won't challenge you or make you think too hard, but Nunez does do a good job of portraying the protagonist, Cole, realistically enough that you do care what happens to him, which keeps you turning the pages. Several of the other characters are also well developed, and it is easy to become immersed in Nunez's world. If only Nunez had spent a little bit of time adding some people with healthy skepticism of their respective cultures, this might have been a better book.
    • 3/5
      Salvation City is the most unassuming post-apocalyptic story I've ever read. After a flu pandemic devastates the near-future, a young orphaned boy named Cole is taken in by a Christian fundamentalist preacher and his wife. So Cole has to re-adjust from a secular urban lifestyle to a religious rural one, in addition to growing pains and the difficulty of having lost his parents.Small town life in Indiana was portrayed well, and well-drawn characters are one of the book's strong suits. I did, however, miss the more typical dystopian/post-apocalyptic details of the genre - the pandemic only provides a fragile background for the story, whereas I had expected such a severe experience to, more realistically, drastically alter life and even the way people thought about their society for years afterward. So that aspect of the book felt flat to me. But the coming of age story, the nuanced personalities and relationships of Cole's family and almost-family, is told thoughtfully and sympathetically.
    • 4/5
      Salvation City is subtle and realistic. I didn't realize how invested I was in the story until the end came and I found myself with no more pages to turn. I was caught off guard by the descriptions of how the pandemic worked, how the world stopped; how a sullen boy could be dying, orphaned, and wanted again suddenly. Cole is an ordinary kid, but interesting enough to carry the story. The evangelicals who take him in depict many stereotypes of religious fanatics, but they are soft and human, and somehow likable even to Cole. If a coming-of-age story about a boy living in the aftermath of a flu pandemic sounds interesting to you - you will like this book. I expected to enjoy the story because it sounded intelligent and original; I was drawn in and enchanted well beyond my expectations.
    • 5/5
      A flu pandemic kills millions of people worldwide, including the parents of 13 year old Cole Vining. He is eventually taken in by a charismatic evangelical preacher and his wife in the small southern Indiana town of Salvation City. Cole struggles to adjust to his new life. His parents were intellectuals - his father an atheist college professor and his mother a Jewish lawyer - and his new family couldn't be more different from them, yet they somehow form a new family bond and we see Cole grow and mature to become the promise of salvation for the couple that first saved him. The flu pandemic was so authentic and the characters were so real and complex that I couldn't put this book down. I grew to love Cole, Pastor Wyatt and Tracy and found myself rooting for them.
    • 3/5
      Young Cole has learned more in his 13 years of life than most people could handle. He has experienced loss of home, family, health, and memory, only to have finally come to recognize love, life, girls and most of all “home.” This book of one man’s philosophy versus another’s religion reveals the potential of true happiness in the face of unfathomable adversity. I couldn’t put it down, needing to know ‘what happens next?’ Yet realizing that no one ever has that answer. Nor should they. This is wonderfully written, the characters come alive and the possibilities are endless.
    • 4/5
      In her latest book, Sigrid Nunez uses the aftermath of a flu pandemic as the setting for a book that is really more of a classic coming of age story than it is a work of post-apocalyptic literature. (Those looking for another Justin Cronin book should beware, therefore...) That said, Nunez has a beautiful, spare but evocative writing style, and she does a great job with this book, which manages to view all its characters through a sympathetic prism. The flu pandemic has left 13-year-old Cole Vining in an unexpected place -- living with a fundamentalist Christian pastor and his wife, a childless couple eager to care for Cole and to save his soul. It's a different world for Cole -- but with both his "secular" (atheist) parents dead in the pandemic, where else is he to go? He grapples with issues of loyalty -- to his foster parents and his memories of his all-too-human birth parents -- on the way to trying to make hard decisions about his own future. One of the strongest elements in this book is Nunez's ability to make all off her characters sympathetic -- from Cole's mother, who, despite her failings, emerges as a strong and devoted mother and someone willing to sacrifice herself for others, to the "rapture-ready" inhabitants of Salvation City, eager to embrace Cole as one of their number. The story is told through Cole's eyes, albeit in the third person, so the reader can almost feel the disconnect that he is experiencing emotionally. Nunez's writing is spare but elegant, and her ability to communicate in the voice of a 13/14 year old boy is impressive. I'd recommend this to anyone looking for a literary novel that deals with issues like identity and personal responsibility, rather than a dystopian/post-apocalyptic novel. If the publishers push that angle, they'll do the author a disservice. Also, while this is a relatively short book, with deceptively simple and straightforward plot developments and language, the themes it addresses are ones that are likely to resonate for a while -- it will stay on my shelf and I expect to pick it up and re-read it. A worthy addition to Nunez's works.
    • 3/5
      Thirteen year old Cole Vinnings is lucky to be alive after the flu pandemic that killed his parents and a large population of the world. After spending time in hellish conditions in an orphanage, he is fostered by a Christian minister and his wife. Their vision of life and the future is one that is very far removed from what Cole had grown up with but he finds himself drawn in, if never being a true believer. The couple are loving if a bit vapid and raise Cole on the basics of their religious practice. Cole tries to navigate an identity for himself in this new world while coming to terms with his past and trying to forge a future. When I started this book, I was under the impression that I would be reading about a dystopian future. But this society was almost identical to present day. The technology was no more advanced than what we have today and while this was not a big issue to me, it was a sign of my future feelings about this book. I went from somewhat disliking Cole to reversing that decision as I reminded myself that he was just a young child. At first he seemed oddly unemotional and unattached to most of those around him, even his parents when they were alive. I think part of his behavior may have his way of defending himself from a society where he always felt somewhat apart. I am truly at a loss on how to describe my feelings about this book. I definitely did not dislike it but I can' t say that I loved it either. I guess the best I can say is that I was left dissatisfied, unfulfilled by the whole experience. I think this stems from the fact that about midway through this book, I realized that the book lacked a coherent direction. By the end, I felt like I had just aimlessly wandered through a desert and came out wanting. I found Cole's life before the pandemic interesting if not compelling and his life after in in the apocalyptic christian city just bland. By the end, realized that there was too much of a disconnect for me to enjoy this book.*Review copy provided by Riverhead Books a division of Penguin.