Review for Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Across the Universe

Author: Beth Revis

Publisher: Razorbill

Source: Personal Copy

Challenges: For the Love of YA, 350 Pages, I'd Wish I'd Read That

398 pages

   

 

"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." Goodreads

   Across the Universe is sci-fi for teens who don't like sci-fi, just like Beth said in one interview. Plain and simple.

   This was my first sci-fi read and wow, let me be the first to admit, it won't be my last! Beth Revis your a genious! Really all I have to say is, Why did it have to end?

   The first chapter didn't hook me, it was the second-and third chapters that did it to me. I mean seriously, this plot is amazing! How does a person come up with all those twists and gasps? I'm still awed. The book had so much mystery that I was reading when I should have been doing something else just so I could find out the ultimate answer: who?

  I loved the character Elder. He really became a 3D person to me, I could understand what he was thinking and why he did he things he did. But alas, Amy. In the beginning (really throughout the book) she kind of came off whiny and 5-year-oldish. Considering all the things she had to deal with though, I guess that's normal. Still, sooner or later she needs to get it together. Now, I bet all of you are wondering, what about the romance? Sad to say there isn't much but when you get reading, you'll get so absorbed in the plot that seriously it doesn't matter. There is some, and that was enough for me.

  The plot, well really I think you get my drift that the plot is off the charts. Beth Revis is an amazing writer, her words flow and don't clash. The conversations are believable, the for-shadowing is brilliant, and overall it's a ride that you wont forget - or want to miss!

  What else must I say to convince you? GO GET IT! Seriously, I highly recommend you read it! I found myself sighing, gasping, and marvelling at the brilliance of it all. My hat is off to Beth Revis for her stunning debut!

NOTE TO AUTHOR: Write really fast, I need to know what happens next!!

Excerpt:

And I thought: At least I'll sleep. I will forget, for three hundred and one years, everything else.
And then I thought: That will be nice.
And then whoosh! The flash freeze filled the tiny chamber. I was in ice. I was ice.
I am ice.
But if I'm ice, how am I conscious? I was supposed to be asleep; I was supposed to forget about Jason and life and Earth for three hundred and one years. People have been cryo frozen before me, and none of them were conscious. The mind is frozen; it cannot be awake or aware.
I've read before of coma victims who were supposed to be knocked out with anesthesia during an operation, but really they were awake and felt everything.

I hope—I pray—that's not me. I can't be awake for three hundred and one years. I'll never survive that.
Maybe I'm dreaming now. I've dreamt a lifetime in a thirty-minute nap. Maybe I'm still in that space between frozen and not, and this is all a dream. Maybe we haven't left Earth yet. Maybe I'm still in that limbo year before the ship launches, and I'm stuck, trapped in a dream I can't wake from.
Maybe I've still got three hundred and one years stretching out before me.
Maybe I'm not even asleep yet. Not all the way.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I only know one thing for certain.
I want my year back.