When Dean runs past his mother to catch his school bus, he figures it's just a normal day. No need for sappy goodbyes. The ride to school starts off normal enough. Then the hail starts, growing larger until it leaves huge dents in the bus' roof. The driver makes for the shelter of a superstore. After the bus crashes, Dean finds himself stranded in the store with five other high schoolers, two eighth graders and six elementary school kids (who were on the bus behind his). Outside of the store the world is being torn apart, inside they're all trying to keep it together and figure out how to survive. 
 Monument 14 focuses much more on the survival aspect of the end of the world. What adds to the creep factor is that it's a very believable future (BBC's End Day documentary came to mind often while I was reading this). The characters are mostly sheltered from the horrors of natural and man made disasters striking outside the store. Through Dean's eyes we see how people react to grief and fear differently. Dean is an interesting storyteller. He's funny, although not always intentionally, and actually really average. He isn't coming up with the master plans and saving the day. He's just a pretty normal teenager, which makes him easy to relate to. This book has a rather large group of characters, but Laybourne does a very good job of differentiating them. 
 Despite the slower pace of the book (after the initial excitement of the hail storm, the action doesn't pick up until the very end), I found this to be a page turner. I wanted to see how these characters were going to handle surviving. Dean's narration made it compelling. I also really liked the format of the book. Each page has what day the events were taking place marked at the bottom. The entire book takes place in the span of twelve days. The end was a little abrupt and left more questions than answer in setting up book two, but I guess it's never a bad thing if your major complaint is not wanting it to end.