Book Review - Across the Universe

 Across the Universe

Author: Beth Revis

Series: Across the Universe #1

Genres: Dystopian, Space | Young Adult

Release Date: January 11th 2011

Publishers: Razorbill

No. Pages: 398

Source: Gifted

Rating: 

Buy From: Amazon | Book Depository | Barnes and Noble | Waterstones

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

As the summary suggest the main character, Amy and her parents are going to be cryogenically frozen and placed aboard a spaceship, where they will be there taken to a new planet and expected along with the others, to terraform and colonise it. It takes 300 years to get there, but Amy is woken up 50 years early and left to melt. 100 people have been cryogenically frozen for the mission, and 99 of them have certain skills that are needed, Amy however volunteered so she could be with her family. Now it looks like she did it all for nothing.

On the spaceship Godspeed there isn't a ruling system like Amy is used to on earth. Instead there is only Eldest, the leader and Elder, the second in command. There is no police or people trained to catch the person responsible, so the job is left to Amy and Elder, the only other person on the ship who is her age.  Amy gets the feeling that things aren't right on the ship. The feeders (nothing more than maybe farmers) are quick to believe anything Eldest has said, acting more like brain dead zombies without any free thought, and those of the people who can think for themselves or are artistic in any way, are all stuck on the hospital ward taking a daily doss of pills and believing they are crazy.

If that wasn't enough, more and more people are being woken early and left to die, Amy and Elder no closer to the person who is commenting the crimes. On top of trying to catch a killer, Amy is still trying to adjust to life on Godspeed and trying to come to terms with the fact that she wont see her parents again, at least she has Elder to help and comfort her though. Soon both Amy and Elder are seeing that Eldest and the ship hold many more secrets than they imagined

Across the Universe is a book that I feel I've been waiting forever to read, it's been on my TBR shelve for ages, and I've had it on my kindle for just as long, so when I started organising my reading by months I decided that it was time. This books started out good but I'm sad to say that it isn't without its flaws.

My biggest issue with this book was how it was so predictable. I knew who the 'killer' was from the start and I also knew things they tried to subtlety hint at only to reveal at the end. And anyone who knows me , knows I have a very hard time getting over the predictability of a book, there's only a few books that I still enjoy despite it. Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't all bad. I liked some of the characters, sadly they we the sub characters. I found the main ones high annoying, Eldest was maybe the worst character out of the lot, I really didn't like him. The world that Beth Revis was good, but just not for me, I wasn't blown away and maybe that was because I had went into it excited about reading it after so long and in a way, expecting to feel more.

The relationships in it I also didn't get. The only one for me that was believable was between a sub character and his dead girlfriend. I just didn't think Elder and Amy worked well together at all, others may disagree with me but that's how I fell. I think this book would have been brilliant for its target audiences which I'm guessing is between 12-16, but I don't think that anyone above that age would feel the same as they do and connect with it as much. So just because I didn't really like it as much as I would have hoped, doesn't mean its all Bet Revis's fault, it just isn't one of those YA books that you could read regardless of age.