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.
