Review: Monument 14 by Emmy Labourne

Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Publishing Date: June 5th, 2012
Genre: YA
Pages: 294 pgs
ISBN: 9780312569037
Source:borrowed from library

Summary from Goodreads:

Your mother hollers that you’re going to miss the bus. She can see it coming down the street. You don’t stop and hug her and tell her you love her. You don’t thank her for being a good, kind, patient mother. Of course not—you launch yourself down the stairs and make a run for the corner.Only, if it’s the last time you’ll ever see your mother, you sort of start to wish you’d stopped and did those things. Maybe even missed the bus.But the bus was barreling down our street, so I ran.

Fourteen kids. One superstore. A million things that go wrong.

In Emmy Laybourne’s action-packed debut novel, six high school kids (some popular, some not), two eighth graders (one a tech genius), and six little kids trapped together in a chain superstore build a refuge for themselves inside. While outside, a series of escalating disasters, beginning with a monster hailstorm and ending with a chemical weapons spill, seems to be tearing the world—as they know it—apart.

My Review: 

 

I had wanted to read this book since I first heard it was about a bunch of kids stuck in a superstore, a la Walmart style, during some sort of natural disaster.  I immediately put it on hold at my local library, as my book buying habits have been a little out of control, and it seemed to take forever for it to be my turn to read this book.  When it finally came it I was pretty excited to dive right into but the only problem was that I am smack dab in the middle of moving and I was afraid I’d lose the book.  A sensible person may decide to leave it and not pick up a library book a week before moving but I, my friends, am not a sensible person at times.  I decided to pick it up and get right into it.  It took me a little bit of time because I have been busy but it didn’t take me that long all things considered.  This is the type of book you can devour in one sitting if you wanted to.  The book starts off with a lot of action, a bunch of kids in a bus heading to school get stuck in a major hail storm.  I’m not talking about the kind of hail storm you see from time to time in the winter; I am talking hail big enough to crush people and cars.  If that isn’t a good way to suck someone in, I don’t know what is. 

I have to admit that while there was a lot of action in the beginning there wasn’t too much action in the middle section of the book.  I can see some people finding the book a little flat at times but I have to say that I didn’t find the book that way.  The middle part was used to develop the characters in the book.  While Dean is the main character and the book is told from his perspective, the rest of the cast of characters gets a pretty equal amount of face time in the book.  I really like that you get to know all the characters, including the little ones who may not be seen to have too much to contribute to the story. 

One of the things that drew me into this book is that I thought it was a stand alone novel.  I’m not sure why I thought this at the time but by the end of the book it became apparent that this was not a standalone novel.  With 20 pages left we still didn’t know much about what was going on in the outside world.  This was the one disappoint of the novel.  I have read so many series lately and ending every book on a cliff hanger is really starting to irritate me.  I do like the anticipation of the second or third book a bit but in the long run I am the most impatient person ever.  I also find that because I read so many books, sometimes I forget the storyline of the first book by the time the second book comes out. 

Does anyone else have this problem?  Anyhow, all this to say that I was slightly disappointed not to know what was going to happen with the characters by the end of the book.  I suppose if this was my only fault in the story then it must have been a pretty good novel.  Overall,  I quite enjoyed this book and I will be impatiently awaiting the second one.