Series Worth Reading: Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne

I made a choice not too long ago to only read series when they were completed, and I had all the books in my possession.  What a good choice.  Instead of reading one book and then forgetting it and trying to get back into the series a year later, I can read them all within weeks of each other.  I usually intersperse standalones between books but not so many that I lose track of the series.  This has turned series reading into a welcome event instead of an exercise in frustration.  Happily, there are oodles and tons of complete YA series that are out there ripe for the reading (and reviewing...with only light spoilers!).

Monument 14 is one such series.  I'm an easy target for a good post-apocalyptic/dystopian series, and this one was great.

Book one wastes no time getting right into the nitty gritty of the apocalypse.  Dean and his brother Alex are running to catch their school buses little knowing that their lives as they knew them are about to be over.  Between home and school the buses are caught in a treacherous hail storm.  Dean's bus wrecks, but, quick thinker Mrs. Wooly, the elementary school bus driver plows her bus into a Greenway super store.  Unfortunately, the hail storm is only the beginning, and soon the group of unsupervised kids has taken more permanent shelter inside the store while the world outside endures catastrophe after catastrophe.

Monument 14 is cleverly conceived as both a post-apocalyptic thriller and a sort of social experiment that brings together average, slightly nerdy Dean with Jake the jock and Niko, a boy scout always prepared type, and a herd of scared and/or bratty elementary school kids.  While the world outside is crumbling under freak weather events and the release of a military grade toxin that interacts with certain blood types to produce dangerous effects, a motley assortment of grade schoolers is learning to rely on each other to survive.  It's interesting to see how long the normal high school social construct holds up before it becomes apparent that it's becoming a thing of the past.

The three books follow the group of kids from their safe haven in the super store out into the destroyed world, starting with Dean as the narrator and branching out to other points of view as circumstances change.  The post-apocalyptic world Laybourne presents is terrifying, filled with people desperate to get by and people who are wreaking havoc unaware thanks to the chemical weapon leak.  The pace is quick, with the kids dodging near disasters of all kinds as they seek a more permanent kind of safety than the Greenway has to offer.  Despite the abundance of characters presented, Laybourne doesn't scrimp on the character development, and each kid young and old(er) has a personality all their own.

The Monument 14 books are can't-put-them-down thrillers that read fast and have you longing for a happy ending for the "family" of kids who were unexpectedly thrown together in the Greenway on one fateful day.  

Top Ten Tuesday: Unfinished Reading

Wow, it's been forever since I did a Top Ten Tuesday.  Today's topic seemed like a great one to pick up with, however.  My readerly life is littered with series that I've started but not continued reading.  A lot of those series are even finished being written now.  This week The Broke and the Bookish are asking about all those completed series that we need to go back and finish reading.  Here are mine...

1. The Chaos Walking Series by Patrick Ness -  That's right, I, Megan of Leafing Through Life, have committed the cardinal sin of not having gotten past The Knife of Never Letting Go in my reading of The Chaos Walking Series. Admittedly, I didn't think I loved TKONLG as much as the rest of my book blogging brethren, but I never intended to quit the series. 

2. The Chemical Garden Trilogy by Lauren DeStefano - I loved Wither so much that I snapped up the other two books in the series as they came out, but I still have yet to actually read them.  I'm pretty eager to get back to this series, but I think I'll be starting over again at the beginning to refresh my memory.

3. Matched by Ally Condie - I picked up a copy of Matched at my very first BEA, and loved it.  Then I waited a year for the next book and never picked the series back up again.  I have all the books at my disposal now, so it's about time I got back to this one.

4. Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr - I loved Melissa Marr's faerie world when I originally read Wicked Lovely.  Now I finally have the rest of the books in the series.  Time for a binge read!

5. Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne - I'm loving this series about a bunch of kids fighting to survive the apocalypse in a department store. This is one series I can guarantee I'll be finishing, and soon!

6. Shade by Jeri Smith-Ready - Okay, I read Shade a good few summers ago, and I didn't love it, but I think I was falling out of love with paranormal YA after a summer over-saturated with it.  I think this is a series I might want to get back to and finish after all.

7. The Gemma Doyle series by Libba Bray - I devoured A Great and Terrible Beauty one Memorial Day weekend when I was hideously sick, and I loved it so much.  Boarding school and magic, always a winning combo, right? I finally managed to amass the other two books, so it's long past time to get back to this one.


8. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer - I read the first Twilight book before having done so practically instantly made you an object of ridicule.  I have the box set on my shelves.  Should I finish?  Or is this so five minutes ago?  LOL

9. Penryn and the End of Days by Susan Ee - I was so addicted to the first book of this series about a world overtaken by evil angels that I remember sitting in my car in the grocery store parking lot to finish it instead of putting it down to go do my shopping.  All three books are loaded on my Kindle now.  Can't wait to find out the rest of the story!

10.  The Last Survivors by Susan Beth Pfeffer - I looooooved Life As We Knew It and its impressively realistic view of the start of the apocalypse. Despite what appears to be widespread disappointment with the other three books in the series, I can't help wanting to return to Pfeffer's world where the moon got a little too close and wreaked havoc over the earth.

What series do you need to finish?  Would you encourage me to finish (or not finish) any of the series' above?