Across the Universe review

Across the Universe
Beth Revis
January 11th 2011
Razorbill


A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone-one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship-tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

Across the Universe is, in one word, amazing. Everything about it was just absolutely brilliant. I loved pretty much everything about it, from the characters to the plot, the ship to the writing. I just loved it.

Amy and Elder were great characters, and they both developed well throughout the book, Elder seeing that he does not have to follow exactly in Eldest footsteps to be a great leader, and him seeing Godspeed through Amy's eyes, being full of lies and life on board the ship just not being right. And Amy I felt I  could relate to, because if I had been woken early onto a spaceship mid-flight, with the ship landing so that she would probably never see her parents awake and unfrozen again, I think I would react in the same way. I think most of us would.

Another brilliant thing about this book was the Godspeed, and the description of space. Space is something that frightens me, I'm not going to lie. I love Sci-fi, but I cannot understand the mentality of people who would give up their lives to live in a tin floating around in nothingness, where if something goes wrong no one will hear you. The whole claustrophobic aspect of space I think Beth captured perfectly.  And I especially wouldn't want to live on a ship like the Godspeed, with a man like Eldest as the leader. Just so much was wrong about the Godspeed. It was horrible, and creepy and their society and the way they live was just so twisted and wrong and I felt all of it. I felt all of their hopelessness and their entrapment, and I felt their pain, I felt Harley's pain (read it and you'll understand.) Plus, The Season grossed the hell out of me. Eww... They could at least do it in a building and not just on the floor... Gross.

This book was seriously so good. The end was brilliant, and even though we know that there will be two more, I think it could've ended there, (to the great annoyance of everyone though,) but there is definitely more than enough room for two more books, and I really can't wait for them. I greatly look forward to seeing where Amy and Elder's story is headed, and to reading about their budding relationship, despite the little bump in the relationship road at the end. Across the Universe is a book I definitely recommend, whether or not you like sci-fi, or space or whatever. It's amazing! 5 stars :D