Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Across the Universe 
by Beth Revis

Published: January 2011

Publisher: Razorbill

Available: Amazon

Synopsis:

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.

Review:

Okay, so I'm a closet Trekkie and while I wasn't the huge Star Trek fan my dad and sister were, I grew to love it after the long hours they forced me to watch it. The rebooted movie with Chris Pine and Simon Pegg definitely had me loving it and it doesn't hurt that William Shatner is just an awesome Canadian. But what does Star Trek have to do with Across the Universe? Not much, well except the whole part about it being on a ship traveling through space, going where no man has gone before. Okay, so the similarities pretty much stop there, but it was enough to get me interested and considering I hate reading science fiction that really impressed me.

Across the Universe looks at what happens to a society of people trapped together on a ship, unable to see even the stars, generation after generation, and what happens when an individual is added to their environment unexpectedly. Revis does an amazing job of slowly building up the mystery of what happened on the ship to change the people and an even better job of showing how Amy must come to terms with what is going to become her life.

I have to say that even though I figured out certain plot points fairly early on, Revis did manage to surprise me with one aspect of the story, which of course I can't even hint at, or you'd figure it out much quicker then I did. I also loved how Amy doesn't sacrifice her feelings about what happened to her, but she retains her smarts enough to know that a certain amount of acceptance is the only thing that will keep her going.

Definitely a book I would reread, and I can't wait to read the sequel!