Review: Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne

Title: Monument 14
Author: Emmy Laybourne
Series: Stand Alone
Published By: Feiwel & Friends (June 5, 2012)
Source: ARC Provided by the Publisher
Genre: YA Dystopian
My Rating: 4 Stars

Goodreads Description:

  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 hurdle 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:
 

It seems lately that the market is flooded with new dystopian novels. Every where you look some one somewhere is coming out with something. It is getting to the point that it is hard to find something that hasn't been done before and that doesn't seem like all the others.

I like dystopian, I really do but it isn't always my favorite genre to read about, I think mainly because at times it comes off too depressing and heartbreaking and I find I need to take a good long breather from the genre before starting another one.

And even though I had just finished a great dystopian, the premises for this one was just calling out to me and I knew I needed to start it.

This really is different from the other dystopians out there. For one it is told through the point of view of a boy, something I am always saying is lacking in the YA genre. I have no idea why this is. Maybe more girls read this genre therefore the authors make the main characters girls more of the time? Or maybe because a lot of the authors are women themselves so it is just easier writing from a point of view of a woman.

I have no idea but, it is refreshing to find the POV coming from a boy every now and then, even if I myself, don't always relate to them, it is just nice to have something different, something to mix it up a little.

The author definitely did that.

This book isn't only about a boy though, it is in fact about a group of kids, 14 of them in fact, ranging in age from around 5 to 16 all from a small town in Monument, Colorado.

What I liked about this story was that it felt real, all the emotions of the characters, the situations of putting all those different ages and personalities together in one place under the conditions that they were in, it never felt too far out there or too unrealistic.

I think having it told through Dean, just like a normal teenage boy would talk to a friend really helped with that as well and although there were some very real situations, not all happy and carefree, this never felt depressing. Yeah things were pretty horrible and crazy but they made the best of it and they soldiered on.

There were some really great characters in this story and they all had different weaknesses and strengths that all came together to create a pretty united front.

The only downside to this story was how it ended. It just didn't feel over to me, like maybe it started to get a little rushed and there wasn't any real solution. Yeah they had a plan but I would have liked an epilogue I think. Something to say what happened to them in the end.

What happened to the kids, Mrs. Wooly, the parents? The ones that stayed, the ones that left?

I don't know. I think it could have had a little better of an ending.

Who knows, maybe there will be a sequel and that is why it was left as it was? Or maybe we are just suppose to imagine our own ending, good or bad.