Review: Monument 14 *Spoilers*

[nsharpes]

Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne is a dystopian novel focusing on 14 children who range in age from 5 to 16/17. Our narrator Dean is a high school junior on his way to school one morning when giant sized hail starts to fall from the sky and all heck breaks loose. The high school bus Dean is on crashes, kids die and the ones who survive are trapped, as their bus landed on its side. Meanwhile, the K-8 bus, on which is Dean's younger brother Alex, avoids crashing and makes it to a local Greenway store (think Wal-Mart or Target) where the bus driver unloads the younger children and then drives to the high school bus, which is on fire at this point in Greenway's parking lot. After the surviving teenagers are rescued, they are also taken to the Greenway store, where after some discussion, the bus driver who drove the K-8 bus leaves the children to go get help.

And that's just the beginning of the book

The bus driver of the K-8 bus never comes back and the rest of the story is centered around how the kids live day to day in the store...how they manage to organize, keep themselves entertained, the arguments and fights that happen, and them trying to understand what is happening to the world on the outside.

I found the book interesting, especially when I got to the part about the leak at NORAD and how the chemicals affect people differently based on blood type. Some people turn into maniacs, some get blisters, some get hallucinations and the last group is basically immune (other then their reproductive system being affected).

The book would have got a higher rating, but I felt the writing could have been better and there could have been more explanation of the world the kids live in before everything happens. There are things called big-tabs and it's illegal for every student in school K-12 to not ride the school bus...something about a fuel shortage?

Overall, I found the book to be good, with an interesting concept and I will definitely be continuing with the series

[Sarah Clay]

I enjoyed this book. The action was good, the characters were diverse, and the circumstances were unique.

[P_hernandez]

Monument 14 is a post-apocalyptic story about 14 teens and kids dealing with the after effects of a major chemical catastrophe. It's set in a superstore and the characters have to figure out how to survive the world and each other at the same time.

This book was a quick read. I enjoyed the series (there are three books) but I felt the author was heavily present in every single word. There was never a moment where I was able to just get in lost in the world of Alex or Dean or Niko or Astrid. She never left them alone long enough for the reader to form their own views of the characters. The story takes place in the year 2024, not too far into the future. Yet, the vernacular the author chose to voice her characters with was too out of touch with the regular flow of speech by being either outdated or way too adult. There was no natural flow. For example, the overuse of the word "kiddos" from multiple characters, child and adult, at different times. The swearing was just as uneven. Sometimes it was censored and sometimes it wasn't.

The subject content was extremely heavy for a young adult genre. Some of the main characters partook in underage age drinking and drug abuse. There was a lot of sex for this genre and it wasn't even veiled so the reader had use their imagination. It was just...sex. My biggest problem with that was the sexualizing of a 13yr old girl, who the author chose as the prime candidate to use as rape bait. Because a story isn't interesting or a situation isn't dire unless one of the characters gets raped? It just was a storyline that didn't need to be explored.

The story was compelling, but I felt the plot lagged in so many places due to unnecessary information and then in other spots there wasn't enough information. The reader was left with many unanswered questions as a result of this.

All in all I'd give this book a 4 out of 5 because even though it was written in a mediocre way, it was entertaining and it did hold the readers attention. I would recommend this book, however, if you are a parent who thinks it would be a good read for your child, please read it first to make sure you are comfortable with the more sensitive subject matters.