Originally posted at The Wandering Fangirl.


I’m sort of a sucker for apocalyptic stories (right long with dystopian stories), so I grabbed Monument 14 the moment I saw it at the library. It seemed so promising: fourteen kids stuck together and trying to survive in a Walmart-like super store as the world crumbles around them. That story never goes well, does it?

The plot certainly starts off with a bang — or a few hundred of them, as a school bus carrying our hero and other characters is caught in the midst of a huge hailstorm. A kick-ass bus driver rams her bus straight into the super store and saves as many kids as she can (which is, unfortunately, only the fourteen in our title). From those opening moments on I was totally engrossed with the plot as it unfolded – for better or for worse.

Mostly for so-so.

The first person narrative focuses on Dean, one of the older teens as he tries to work through the insanity: a shell-shocked class mate, a crush, his little brother, a bunch of kids who are barely eight years old, and yeah, the apocalypse going on outside. Things go as smoothly as they can make it, but things continue to fall apart, and eventually the kids have to barricade themselves from the outside world. This is when it’s all supposed to get interesting, but it doesn’t quite get there.

There’s a sort of fantasy in living in a super store like these kids do. You’ve got everything you could need to ride out the apocalypse, but the store only seemed to serve as a sort of constant deus ex machina for the kids. Need to make food? There are microwaves! Need to seal off every window and door? Tarp and duct tape and nail guns and comforters! Need beds? Air mattresses, of course. Entertainment? Just head on down the next aisle! It was fun, but after a while it started to drag, and the relationships the kids develop and work through just weren’t enough to pick up the slack.

The only characters I really remember are Dean himself, who didn’t seem to have much of a personality beyond scared (and horny) teenage boy, his little brother the oh-so-helpful tech genius, and the boy scout leader type whose name I don’t even remember. The ups and downs the group experience didn’t mean a single thing to me, and I got tired of the drama after a while. I wasn’t truly moved until the very ending, and even that was so obviously manufactured to move me that I rolled my eyes even as I was tearing up. (Just a teeny tiny bit.)

So engrossing, yet so forgettable.