Review: Monument 14 (Monument 14, #1) by Emmy Labourne

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.

This is one of those stories, where the description had me unsettled before I'd even opened up this title to start reading.  The whole premise is scary and beyond eerie.  Who wants to think about the world ending, or being separated from your family and friends if and when that event were to happen?  And the idea of a government project going wrong and having strange and dangerous effects on those individuals who are close by the source?  Not me, that's for sure!

So if you're not a fan of suspense I'm going to go out on a limb here and just say this book probably won't be for you....or at least not one of your favorites.  I'm caught in the middle.  I have to be in the right mood to read a book with a premise like this one, and even if I am in the mood, I often have to take breaks while reading so I don't completely let myself get too freaked out.  This book is intense from start to finish.  The ideas and events can sometimes be a little far fetched, but when you really think about, all of the major events in history and that have occurred within our environment, probably were thought of the same way before they actually happen.

Laybourne has a great writing style that puts her readers a sort of zone so to speak, and she often left me feeling as though I was in the book itself not just reading it on my own time.  This of course had my heart racing and my anxiety levels creeping up on me on more than one occasion.  Without giving away any spoilers it's hard to talk about the characters and events that take place in the story Laybourne lays out for her audience, but it's one I think is worth reading and one a series I'm curious to see unfold further.  So if you haven't had the chance to pick this read up yet, and you're in the mood to make yourself anxious and a little bit stressed out, while enjoying the ride, this title might be right up your alley.

I gave Monument 14 (Monument 14, #1) 3 shamrocks!!!