What a great story! This YA dystopian novel set in the future features 14 children, several teens, tweens and young elementary school children, trying to live inside of a superstore while the outside world falls apart.

A bus ride to school turns into a nightmare when hail like none ever seen before begins to destroy Monument, Colorado. The bus driver decides that the closest, safest place to ride out the hail storm is inside the superstore, and she literally drives the bus inside. However, when she leaves to get help, the children discover that the hail storm is only the beginning of the calamity. The teens and children begin to deal with the idea that their families and friends may be dead, their country has been destroyed and at any minute, and they must try to survive on their own. New challenges continue to arise and each of them must make decisions about how they will contribute, or not, to their new 'family' and what they are willing to do to survive.

This novel takes place in the future, but in a very compressed time period of only weeks and this keeps the story moving from crisis to crisis fairly quickly. The reader develops a personality profile of each character in a very short time and while their survival is always in question, I think the reader will be rooting for most of them.

I would recommend this book to YA readers who are looking for a survivalist angle to their dystopia fantasy. Thumbs up.