Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

My edition: eBook, published in 2011, 398 pages.

Description: 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:

Across the Universe was an absolutely fascinating read about a space ship that sets off from Earth and has been traveling for several centuries to reach a substitute planet to live on. Some people from our time have been frozen and are stored to be awoken on the new planet and use their knowledge to make it habitable. Others are several generations down the line from the original people populating the ship. Cue a girl from our time accidentally waking up and being thrown into an environment that is vastly different than what she is used to.

And despite so many young adult novels at the moment the main focus isn't a Mary Sue main character chasing a perfect boy, instead it's on the differences between the girl Amy, from our time, and the people living on the ship that do not know what Earth really was like. For instance, they have never heard the sound of the ocean and are unfamiliar to diversity of races.

The only reason I did not give Across the Universe a 10 out of 10 is because it gets very predictable, very fast. Most revelations I saw coming a few chapters ahead and the biggest one of them all I figured out straight away. Nonetheless the future it's set in and the political games played are mighty fascinating, making this book definitely worth a read.

8/10