YA: Your Athenaeum

Currently on the New YA Bookshelf is Emmy’s Laybourne’s apocalyptic story set in a Colorado shopping center, Monument 14. From Tor:

The time? 2024. The place? Monument, Colorado. The problems? Are just starting.

A freak hailstorm forces fourteen kids—six high schoolers, 2 eight graders, and six younger children—to seek refuge in Greenway, a Wal-Mart-like superstore otherwise devoid of inhabitants. Instructed to stay there while the only adult—a bus driver—goes for help, the fourteen kids settle in for the time being. They soon learn that a volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands triggered a mega-tsunami and supercell storms. The East Coast is drowned. The Rockies are devastated. And then an 8.2 earthquake hits, causing further destruction and releasing clouds of toxic chemicals from NORAD storage facilities…

[The kids] soon form a rudimentary society, with the ever-prepared Niko assuming charge while the narrator (Dean) handles cooking, and the super-efficient Josie turns their refuge into a living space and gets the younger kids in a semblance of order. Sadly, not everyone’s on track: football hero Jake is more interested in getting drunk and high than in survival, and Dean’s crush Astrid has a breakdown and vanishes into the depths of the store. Personalities clash and tensions rise, with each of the fourteen responding to the crisis in their own way. Some just want to go home, some are in this for the long haul, and some are ready to give in to their base desires.