Jenna Likes to Read

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Posted on 21 January 2011

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Goodreads Description:

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.

This book was so good!  I am a science fiction and dystopian junkie, so I was probably predisposed to liking it, but I thought it really lived up to the hype!

The world on the Godspeed was pretty amazing.  The technology was futuristic, but believably so.  The environment was really cool and very well thought out.  The science of the book was great.  The freezing scene right at the beginning was insane and totally made me cringe, but really helped draw me into the book quickly.

I really liked Amy and Elder.  I thought their reactions to the world around them made sense for what they had grown up with.  I liked how Amy struggled to come to terms with living on the ship and that she didn’t conform to the ship’s (well, Eldest’s) expectations for her.  I liked that Elder questioned what was going on around him and didn’t take things at face value even though he’d been brainwashed since birth.

Then there’s Eldest… whoa crazy dictator.  But at the same time, he was really interesting, especially as the reasons for his actions came to light.  Did I agree with the things he did or think they were right?  Of course not.  But it made it more believable because he thought he was doing the right thing.

There was one aspect at the end that I didn’t like too much, but after thinking about it for a while, I’m more okay with it now than I was when it was revealed.  But it’s a spoiler so that’s all I am going to say!

I can’t wait until the next book in the series!