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Summary
Summary
Fourteen kids. One superstore. A million things that go wrong.
" Frighteningly real ." -- The New York Times Book Review
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.
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.
Praise for Monument 14 :
"A combination survival and apocalyptic story." -- VOYA
"A real thriller." -- Booklist
"Laybourne's debut ably turns what could have been yet another postapocalyptic YA novel into a tense, claustrophobic, and fast-paced thriller." -- Publishers Weekly , starred review
"Intriguing beyond the survival elements." -- Horn Book
"Readers will eagerly await the second volume. " -- Kirkus Reviews
"Concise, clear, and riveting. A cliff-hanger ending leaves readers devastated but breathlessly awaiting the sequel. A stellar addition to any collection." -- School Library Journal
"Laybourne's strong characterizations of the resourceful, optimistic children who make up this improvised family intensify the horror of the situation and make the almost cartoonish series of catastrophes frighteningly real." -- The New York Times Book Review
By Emmy Laybourne:
The Monument 14 Trilogy
Monument 14 (Book 1)
Monument 14: Sky on Fire (Book 2)
Monument 14: Savage Drift (Book 3)
Sweet
The Berserker series
Berserker (Book 1)
Ransacker (Book 2)
Author Notes
Emmy Laybourne is the author of the Monument 14 series of books. She is also an actress and lyricist. She is an active member of the Advanced BMI Workshop, which is a group of people who write for Broadway-bound musicals. Her newest novel, Sweet, is to be released in 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Actress/screenwriter Laybourne's debut ably turns what could have been yet another postapocalyptic YA novel into a tense, claustrophobic, and fast-paced thriller. In the not-too-distant future, a sudden hailstorm-just one small part of a massive environmental cataclysm-forces 14 Colorado students on their way to school to take refuge in a superstore. Cut off from the previously ubiquitous Network (with only one old TV as an occasional information source), they must cope with the standard personality conflicts and also a biochemical weapon leak that causes behavioral shifts in some of the kids. Bookish Dean narrates, observing his own jealousies and concerns, as well as the way the popular kids-like football players Jake and Brayden, and diving champ Astrid-are forced to question their place in the new social order. Although violence (including a sexual assault) is pervasive, it's rarely graphic and never gratuitous. Laybourne successfully develops a large cast of characters of assorted ages, and if the ending seems designed to tease a sequel, the story still stands well on its own. Ages 13-up. Agent: Susanna Einstein, Einstein Thompson Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
First comes a devastating hailstorm -- enormous balls of ice and debris pelting a pair of school buses two brothers are riding. The high school bus crashes, killing many on board, but Dean and a few others get aboard the younger children's bus, which a savvy driver has driven straight into a superstore (think Walmart or Target) and relative safety. The driver leaves to look for help, but before she can return, there is an earthquake. Finally comes a chemical spill that poisons the air and causes a large segment of the population to go crazy with rage. Take Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It (rev. 11/06) and add a premise in which the kids get to live in a store with abundant resources, free from adult supervision, and you have the ingredients of this fast-paced teen dystopian novel. A rather formulaic premise gradually unfolds to become intriguing beyond the survival elements, as the characters must deal with choices about leadership, bullying, sex, and living with the temptations of alcohol and pharmaceuticals. Dean must also deal with the shame of having attacked his younger brother and others after coming in contact with the personality-altering chemicals. Initially, Laybourne focuses more on the disaster-building than on the characters, but she later deepens the characterization and includes some touching scenes before bringing it all to an exciting conclusion. susan dove lempke (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
It's an unforgettable opener: a school bus is trucking along when a hailstorm begins tapping against the roof and then pounding, and then denting, and then tearing it apart. The bus crashes into a local superstore and the 14 survivors, kids of all ages, seal off the opening. A TV in the electronics department relays the increasingly bad news: a volcano eruption set off a megatsunami, which created supercell storms, one of which destroyed a NORAD facility, which released an 800-mile-wide cloud of experimental toxins into the air. The kids learn the hard way that individual reactions to exposure depend on blood type: Os become murderous, ABs hallucinate, and so on. Dean, 16, and the older kids are forced to create a workable society, one tested at every turn by dangerous drifters, internal power struggles, and raging hormones. Following the initial shock, there are few scares; Laybourne is more concerned with weaving a realistic, multicharacter survival story. It's a bit quiet a times, though the ending is a real thriller. Sounds like a sequel storm is brewing.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVEN in an economic downturn, who isn't still wooed by the material Mecca of a superstore, whether it's to goggle at the luxury goods or merely to sample the high-fat comfort fare of the food court? Holly Golightly's assertion that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's resonates because it seems instinctively true. Shimmering ladders of gold chains, polished rows of perfect produce or neat rainbow stacks of cotton T-shirts can provide a sense of well-ordered security often lacking in the outside world. Two chilling postapocalyptic novels, "Monument 14" and "No Safety in Numbers," both debuts, play with this collective sense of safety in retail therapy, suggesting that something darker may lie beneath the pretty surfaces. In "Monument 14," by Emmy Laybourne, a comedian and actress, the consumer refuge is a fictitious Greenway store in Monument, Colo. Set in 2024, the story unfolds in a world where all students have tablet computers that run on an über-reliable national network; its collapse is the first sign something is awry since, as we learn, "the Network had never, ever gone down." After surviving a horrific morning school bus crash caused by a freak hailstorm, Dean Glieder, a high school junior who is the book's narrator, and 13 other surviving children find themselves in a state of profound shock, forced to organize a makeshift community within Greenway's Walmart-like walls. Once inside, they learn via television that a Canary Island volcano set off a tsunami that has taken out the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States. The eruption also initiated intense storms that have pummeled the rest of the country. And, in short order, the devastation is followed by an 8.2 earthquake, which compromises the seals of Monument's chemical-weapon storage facility. This causes the release of deadly poisons that, depending on blood type, leave victims paranoid, violent, sterile or dead. Whoa. While shopping therapy cannot possibly assuage the grim aftershocks of the accumulated disaster, the older teenagers among the group quickly realize their incredible luck in landing in Greenway - especially after they realize they have enough resources to live on for almost two years as long as they ration and allow no one else inside. Yet when they discover that the escaped contaminants can be passed not only through air but also through running water, their refuge threatens to become their final resting place. Laybourne's strong characterizations of the resourceful, optimistic children who make up this improvised family intensify the horror of the situation and make the almost cartobnish series of catastrophes frighteningly real. After last year's deadly events in Japan, the novel's rapidly amassing disasters seem disturbingly plausible. Unlike the sanctuary of the Greenway in "Monument 14," the mall at the center of Dayna Lorentz's "No Safety in Numbers" is the target of a biological terrorist When a bomb releasing a deadly flu virus is discovered inside the ventilation system of the Shops at Stonecliff, the Westchester megamall is quickly locked down to keep the potentially infected shoppers from contaminating the greater New York area. The ensuing life-or-death crisis unfolds for four teenagers from different levels of the high school hierarchy: working-class Marco; Lexi the computer whiz; the football rookie Ryan; and Shay, an actress. While Lorentz's attempt to diversify the young adult character pool is laudable (Marco's grandparents are Costa Rican, Lexi is African-American, Shay says her classmates see her as "the Indian chick"), her profiles lean more toward tell than show, and the third-person narration lacks the nuance and first-person intensity of "Monument 14." Nevertheless, her detailed depiction of the escalating chaos over the course of seven long days is deeply unsettling. When the dire extent of the situation is finally revealed, it leads to group panic, mob violence and worse. As the teenagers' increasingly desperate attempts to escape the marbled halls of plenty make clear, once personal choice is taken away, the notion that the mall is anything but a prison is shown to be little more than a carefully constructed fantasy. What we're really buying when we scoop up that hot toy, trendy shoe or carton of organic milk, both authors seem to suggest, is not the purchase itself, but what that coveted object represents: a sense of identity, a feeling of community, the illusion of safety. Surrounded by coffee-table art books, fancy watches and slick cellphones, it's easy to feel that the monsters will be kept at bay. As the tightly bonded teenagers quickly learn in these two riveting disaster novels, it is not our perfectly maintained belongings that will save us, but our messy, rewarding relationships. Deadly poisons leave victims paranoid, violent, sterile or dead. Whoa. Jennifer Hubert Swan is the middle-school librarian at the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School She blogs at Reading Rants.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-Take your everyday apocalyptic story, put some high school and middle school students and kindergarteners together on a bus, hurtle them into a giant supermarket, sprinkle a contamination epidemic, and you get Laybourne's thriller (Feiwel & Friends, 2012). Sophomore outcast Dean narrates the ordeal as he struggles to look out for his brother, keep an eye on his crush, and keep order as major issues arise (contaminated air and water, murderers on the outside, lice). What makes this different from other doomsday titles is its ability to create a solid family amongst the different ages of characters that all look out for the youngest of survivors. Each of the discs begins and ends with an eerie instrumental piece, while Todd Haberkorn's careful narration shows limited emotion as the harrowing events unfold. A few sexual situations and carnage descriptions make this appropriate for slightly older teens. The audio ends abruptly with a cliff-hanger, hinting at a sequel. Fans of Susan Pfeffer's Life as We Knew It (Harcourt, 2006) or Ashfall (Tanglewood, 2011) by Mike Mullin will enjoy Laybourne's debut novel. Purchase where demand for dystopian fiction is high.-Amanda Schiavulli Finger Lakes Library System, NY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
CHAPTER ONE TINKS 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. * * * As I raced down the driveway I heard my mom yell for my brother, Alex. His bus was coming down Park Trail Drive, right behind mine. His bus came at 7:09 on the dot. Mine was supposed to come at 6:57 but was almost always late, as if the driver agreed it wasn't fair to pick me up before 7:00. Alex ran out behind me and our feet pounded the sidewalk in a dual sneaker-slap rhythm. "Don't forget," he called. "We're going to the Salvation Army after school." "Yeah, sure," I said. My bus driver laid on the horn. Sometimes we went over to rummage for old electronics after school. I used to drive him before the gas shortage. But now we took our bikes. I used to drive him to school, too. But since the shortage everyone in our school, everyone, even the seniors, took the bus. It was the law, actually. I vaulted up the bus steps. Behind me I heard Mrs. Wooly, who has been driving the elementary-middle school bus since forever, thank Alex sarcastically for gracing them with his presence. Mrs. Wooly, she was an institution in our town. A grizzled, wiry-haired, ashtray-scented, tough-talking institution. Notorious and totally devoted to bus driving, which you can't say about everyone. On the other hand, the driver of my bus, the high school bus, was morbidly obese and entirely forgettable. Mr. Reed. The only thing he was known for was that he drank his morning coffee out of an old jelly jar. Even though it was early in the route, Jake Simonsen, football hero and all-around champion of the popular, was already holding court in the back. Jake had moved to our school from Texas a year ago. He was a real big shot back in Texas, where football is king, and upon transfer to our school had retained and perhaps even increased his stature. "I'm telling y'all--concessions!" Jake said. "At my old high school a bunch of girls sold pop and cookies and these baked potatoes they used to cook on a grill. Every game. They made, like, a million dollars." "A million dollars?" Astrid said. Astrid Heyman, champion diver on the swim team, scornful goddess, girl of my dreams. "Even if I could make a million dollars, I wouldn't give up playing my own sport to be a booster for the football team," she said. Jake flashed her one of his golden smiles. "Not a booster, baby, an entrepreneur!" Astrid punched Jake on the arm. "Ow!" he complained, grinning. "God, you're strong. You should box." "I have four younger brothers," she answered. "I do." I hunkered down in my seat and tried to get my breath back. The backs of the forest green pleather seats were tall enough that if you slouched, you could sort of disappear for a moment. I ducked down. I was hoping no one would comment on my sprint to catch the bus. Astrid hadn't noticed me get on the bus at all, which was both good and bad. Behind me, Josie Miller and Trish Greenstein were going over plans for some kind of animal rights demonstration. They were kind of hippie-activists. I wouldn't really know them at all, except once in sixth grade I'd volunteered to go door to door with them campaigning for Cory Booker. We'd had a pretty fun time, actually, but now we didn't even say hi to each other. I don't know why. High school seemed to do that to people. The only person who acknowledged my arrival at all was Niko Mills. He leaned over and pointed to my shoe--like, "I'm too cool to talk"--he just points. And I looked down, and of course, it was untied. I tied it. Said thanks. But then I immediately put in my earbuds and focused on my minitab. I didn't have anything to say to Niko, and judging from his pointing at my shoe, he didn't have anything to say to me either. From what I'd heard, Niko lived in a cabin with his grandfather, up in the foothills near Mount Herman, and they hunted for their own food and had no electricity and used wild mushrooms for toilet paper. That kind of thing. People called Niko "Brave Hunter Man," a nickname that fit him just right with his perfect posture, his thin, wiry frame, and his whole brown-skin-brown-eyes-brown-hair combo. He carried himself with that kind of stiff pride you get when no one will talk to you. So I ignored Brave Hunter Man and tried to power up my minitab. It was dead and that was really weird because I'd just grabbed it off the charging plate before I left the house. Then came this little tink, tink, tink sound. I took out my buds to hear better. The tinks were like rain, only metallic. And the tinks turned to TINKS and the TINKS turned to Mr. Reed's screaming "Holy Christ!" And suddenly the roof of the bus started denting--BAM, BAM, BAM--and a cobweb crack spread over the windshield. With each BAM the windshield changed like a slide show, growing more and more white as the cracks shot through the surface. I looked out the side window next to me. Hail in all different sizes from little to that-can't-be-hail was pelting the street. Cars swerved all over the road. Mr. Reed, always a lead foot, slammed on the gas instead of the brake, which is what the other cars seemed to be doing. Our bus hurdled through an intersection, over the median, and into the parking lot of our local Greenway superstore. It was fairly deserted because it was maybe 7:15 by this point. I turned around to look back in the bus toward Astrid, and everything went in slow motion and fast motion at the same time as our bus slid on the ice, swerving into a spin. We went faster and faster, and my stomach was in my mouth. My back was pressed to the window, like in some carnival ride, for maybe three seconds and then we hit a lamppost and there was a sick metallic shriek. I grabbed on to the back of the seat in front of me but then I was jumbling through the air. Other kids went flying, too. There was no screaming, just grunts and impact sounds. I flew sideways but hit, somehow, the roof of the bus. Then I understood that our bus had turned onto its side. It was screaming along the asphalt on its side. It shuddered to a stop. The hail, which had merely been denting the hell out of our roof, started denting the hell out of us. Now that the bus was on its side, hail was hammering down through the row of windows above us. Some of my classmates were getting clobbered by the hail and the window glass that was raining down. I was lucky. A seat near me had come loose, and I pulled it over me. I had a little roof. The rocks of ice were all different sizes. Some little round marbles and some big knotty lumps with gray parts and gravel stuck inside them. There were screams and shouts as everyone scrambled to get under any loose seats or to stand up, pressed to the roof, which was now the wall. It sounded as if we were caught in a riptide of stones and rocks, crashing over and over. It felt like someone was beating the seat I was under with a baseball bat. I tilted my head down and looked out what was left of the windshield. Through the white spray outside I saw that the grammar school bus, Alex's bus, was somehow still going. Mrs. Wooly hadn't skidded or lost control like Mr. Reed. Her bus was cutting through the parking lot, headed right for the main entrance to the Greenway. Mrs. Wooly's going to drive right into the building, I thought. And I knew that she would get those kids out of the hail. And she did. She smashed the bus right through the glass doors of the Greenway. Alex was safe, I thought. Good. Then I heard this sad, whimpering sound. I edged forward and peered around the driver's seat. The front of the bus was caved in, from where it had hit the lamppost. It was Mr. Reed making that sound. He was pinned behind the wheel and blood was spilling out of his head like milk out of a carton. Soon he stopped making that sound. But I couldn't think about that. Instead, I was looking at the door to the bus, which was now facing the pavement. How will we get out? I was thinking. We can't get out. The windshield was all crunched up against the hood of the engine. It was all a crumpled jam. We were trapped in the demolished sideways bus. Josie Miller screamed . The rest of the kids had instinctively scrambled to get out of the hail but Josie was just sitting, wailing, getting pelted by the ice balls. She was covered in blood, but not her own, I realized, because she was trying to pull on someone's arm from between two mangled seats and I remembered Trish had been sitting next to her. The arm was limp, like a noodle, and kept slipping down out of Josie's grip. Trish was definitely dead but Josie didn't seem to be getting it. From a safe spot under an overturned seat, this jerk Brayden, who is always going on about his dad working at NORAD, took out his minitab and started trying to shoot a video of Josie screaming and grabbing at the slippery arm. A monster hailstone hit Josie on the forehead and a big pink gash opened on her dark forehead. Blood started streaming down over her face. I knew that the hail was going to kill Josie if she kept sitting there out in the open. "Christ." Brayden cursed at his minitab. "Come on !" I knew I should move. Help her. Move. Help. But my body was not responding to my conscience. Then Niko reached out and grabbed Josie by the legs and pulled her under a twisted seat. Just like that. He reached out and pulled her two legs toward him and brought her in to his body. He held her and she sobbed. They looked like a couple out of a horror film. Somehow Niko's action had broken the spell. Kids were trying to get out and Astrid crawled to the front. She tried to kick through the windshield. She saw me on the ground, under my seat, and she shouted, "Help me!" I just looked at her mouth. And her nose ring. And her lips moving and making words. I wanted to say, "No. We can't go out there. We have to stay where there is shelter." But I couldn't quite piece the words together. She stood up and screamed to Jake and his people, "We've got to get into the store!" Finally I croaked out, "We can't go out! The hail will kill us." But Astrid was at the back of the bus by then. "Try the emergency exit!" someone shouted. At the back of the bus Jake was already pulling and pulling at the door, but he couldn't get it open. There was mayhem for a few minutes; I don't know how long. I started to feel very strange. Like my head was on a long balloon string, floating above everything. And then I heard such a funny sound. It was the beep-beep-beep sound of a school bus backing up. It was crazy to hear it through the hammering hail and the screaming. Beep-beep-beep, like we were at the parking lot on a field trip to Mesa Verde and the bus was backing up. Beep-beep-beep, like everything was normal. I squinted out, and sure enough, Mrs. Wooly was backing up the elementary-middle school bus toward us. It was listing to the right pretty bad and I could see where it was dented in the front from smashing into the store. But it was coming. Black smoke started pouring in through the hole I was looking through. I coughed. The air was thick. Oily. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I should go to sleep now was the thought that came into my head. It was a powerful thought and seemed perfectly logical: Now I should go to sleep. The cries of the other kids got louder: "The bus is on fire!" "It's going to explode!" and "We're going to die!" And I thought, They're right. Yes, we'll die. But it's okay. It's fine. It is as it should be. We are going to die. I heard this clanking. The sound of metal on metal. And "She's trying to open the door!" And "Help us!" I closed my eyes. I felt like I was floating down now, going underwater. Getting so sleepy warm. So comfortable. And then this bright light opened up on me. And I saw how Mrs. Wooly had gotten the emergency door open. In her hands she held an ax. And I heard her shout: "Get in the godforsaken bus!" Copyright (c) 2012 by Emmy Laybourne Excerpted from Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
