A review by edelm
Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne

2.0

I wanted to like this one I really did. The premise of this book and all the hype surrounding it made me pick this one up. A story about kids finding refuge in a supermarket as the world goes hell sounds just about perfect to me, only that this story was far from perfect. Maybe it's the fact that I work part-time in a supermarket and spend my working days day dreaming about similar stories or maybe it was my love of the supermarket scene in The Darkest Minds, I don't know. All I know is that this sounded like an epic setting for a story at the beginning but I soon realised that 14 kids stuck in a supermarket for an ENTIRE book, gets boring pretty fast.

The main character Dean is meant to be 17 years old, I, however, could not imagine him any older than 12. Not only was it impossible to tell what age he was, his gender was questionable throughout. No joke, I genuinely kept thinking he was a girl, all the time and kept having to tell myself, no Edel, this is Dean, and Dean is supposedly a 17 year old guy and not a 12 year old girl.
Comments such as: "Her eye makeup was all smeared around her eyes and I wondered why nobody fixed her makeup. It was CNN, for God’s sake." did not help. Actual if I was watching CNN and the world around me was ending would care about what the news anchors makeup looked like? Eh, no.

That's just the main character, you also have 13 other characters and let me tell you they do not get any better. You have the jock, the bully, the all-american beauty, the motherly girl who takes care of the kids, the rebellious 13 year old, the evangelist 7 year old who preaches continuously and so on. Do I even need to point out how stereotypical all the characters are? None of them are fleshed out well enough to actually care about any of them, literally not one.

I think I gave this story two stars as it could have gone somewhere brilliant and at the beginning of the book it seemed to be headed that way. The first few chapters in this are action packed. The bus ride of death was easily my favourite part of this book. The people on that bus were being killed off left,right and centre, the author wasn't afraid to kill off a few kids, but as the story continued I just wished she killed off a few more. Sorry, but it's true. Once the kids get inside the store however, they seem more concerned with stupid teenage drama then the fact that the world is ending and everyone they know and love could be dead. We heard glimpses of the wreckage that was occurring in the outside world which would have been a lot more interesting then a couple kids running wild in a store.

The lack of any threat to these kids was what made this story so boring. This not edge of the seat, page turner action, this in fact is no action at all, and this along with the terribly stereotypical and unlikable characters sadly made this story a 2 stars from me. A generous 2 stars and I will not be continuing on with this series.