Charlotte, NC

A good deal of Illumination is set in Charlotte, NC (which is not actually the city in the background of the cover-- Charlotte's big, but it's not that big), mostly because I thought the boys could use a road trip together after everything they've been through. I chose Charlotte because as a young adult, I lived there. It was a nice city. Today, while surfing the web, I came across an article on The Fastest-Growing Big Cities in America, and there was Charlotte, at #5. There are over two million people in Charlotte's metro area now-- far bigger than when I was there. (The article says Charlotte has grown by almost 33% since 2000, and I left long before that.) There's a nice picture of the city's skyscrapers gleaming in the sunlight at the linked article.