** spoiler alert ** For the record the rating of 4 stars, is actually a 3.75 star rating
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 :)
*Book was borrowed from local library
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 :)
*Book was borrowed from local library