Laybourne, Emmy. Monument 14.

Laybourne, Emmy.  Monument 14.  Macmillan/ Feiwel & Friends      296p  $16.99      978-0-312-56903-7   hs  VG-BN Realistic Fiction    

     

This is the story of six Colorado high schoolers, two middle schoolers, and six little kids caught in a gigantic hailstorm on the way to school one morning on their two school buses.  Mrs. Wooly, one of the bus drivers, rescues these kids from both of the buses and ensconces them in the Greenway superstore.  One of the fourteen kids is a boy scout and another is a technical nerd.  The rest range from the superstar football player to five-year-old carrot-topped twins Henry and Caroline.

After Mrs. Wooly gets everyone settled and sealed into the superstore, she leaves to get help.  Shortly the group moves to the media department of the store to watch TV.  It is then that they learn that a volcano has erupted on the Canary Islands and caused a half-mile tall mega-tsunami to race eastward and wipe out the east coast of the U. S.  The result is the creation of super cells that race across the country and over the Rockies, pelting everyone with giant hailstones and destructive winds, only to be followed by an earthquake that has ruptured NORAD’s germ warfare site, causing even more disaster.

The novel tells the story of how these fourteen kids come together to organize, comfort each other, and survive in a monstrous environmental disaster. 

The character development in this novel is superb.  The reader is drawn into the little personality clashes and mini-dramas going on among the characters while they are trying to figure out how to survive.  The relationships between the older kids and the younger ones are also well portrayed, with the older ones taking on parental roles in trying to protect the younger ones from the frightening truth about what is going on outside of the store, and what their chances of survival are.  The writing is superb and edgy, and readers will keep turning the pages in this gripping post-Apocolyptic saga.

Natural Disasters-Fiction, Post-Apocolyptic Fiction   --Linda McNeil