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 Rating: ***
Ok. It's like this: Amazing setting. AMAZING. What a fantastic idea! If I were going to pick a place to be trapped while the outside word was being bombarded with apocalyptic disasters that place would now be a superstore. These kids had everything! And who hasn't dreamed about what it would be like to be trapped in a store like that? Eat anything you want. Clothes? Take your pick. Every gadget or appliance or supply you could need of any kind - just an aisle or two away. It's such a cool idea.
Execution? Not so much.
It's not the writing. The writing or pacing didn't stick out to me in either a good or a bad way.
It's just the teenagers.
They drove me crazy.
Ok. So maybe if I were still a teenager I would have spent my first two days eating pizza and partying. Maybe. But it didn't take long for these kids to realize that they were in serious trouble and probably in for the long haul. But it did take them a long time to start acting responsible. And for heavens sake! Why did they keep eating pizza and frozen foods when they had an entire section of perishables and produce to use up???? WHY???
And. AND. (This is the worst of it). Such content! If it were the end of the world I would certainly hope that a group of teenagers could act more responsibly than drinking, having sex, and abusing drugs from the pharmacy.
I won't keep going on here, but the concept was so cool. Some of the scenes and the characters were super amazing. I just had such a hard time with the teens acting like idiots. Especially when they were taking care of six little kids. And I hate kid peril. I'm a mom, so anytime little kids are separated from their parents it makes me panic. Same reason I hated Michael Grant's Gone series.
So, a great idea and lots of cool and interesting scientific things going on - great end of the world drama, natural disasters and such. If you like that kind of thing and stupid teenagers don't bug you, you will like Monument 14.
This is the first book in a series. Don't know if I will be reading the others. It was quite a cliffhanger, but I don't know if I can take much more if the content is similar. I will be doing some heavy screening of sequel reviews before picking it up.
No comments:
Post a Comment