Title: Across the Universe
Author: Beth Revis
Genre: YA, science-fiction, mystery, romance
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 398
Publisher: Razorbill
Published: 2011
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.
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This novel is a slow burn that has you question everything humanity has to offer.
Although I have been slack with my reading, when I started this book, initially (and I mean at the very, very beginning) I wasn’t swept up into the story. Once I was a chapter in though, whoa! did things change for the best.
Amy is a character I can completely relate to (aside from the fact she likes to run. I shall never understand that.) Waking up in a world, that isn’t even a world, it’s a ship, her actions and reactions throughout the entire novel are believable. She realises with horror that the new planet she was destined for, is a bit farther away than expected. A lot farther. Then of course, there are the questions, who woke her, and why? When more cryogenically frozen people start to be woken, only to be left to die, Amy makes it her purpose to find out who is killing innocent people. She not only shows stubbornness, feistiness and resilience (three traits I just happen to love!) but she shows compassion to those who receive none and confusion when she is forced to witness and experience some not so nice elements of living on Godspeed. She is human. Strong but not perfect: a great character.
Then there are the other elements in this novel that made me take a step back and consider moral and ethical questions that I wasn’t expecting to find. From the mono-ethic race that inhabits
Godspeed to those who live in the hospital due to their ‘unstable’ mind frames, this world (that doesn’t seem too far away) captured my mind, as well as my heart.
I must admit, I grew close to most of the characters. Harley, with his artistic flare and kind soul managed to not only comfort Amy as she came to terms with her new life, but he held me close and won me over. Doc with his erratic behaviour of being open and friendly to then becoming a man with a heart of ice. The mysterious Orion who manages to get under my skin and scratch my nerves without me knowing why, and of course Eldest with his secret ways and hot temper.
And then we come to Elder.
A curious lad I found Elder to be. To be truthful, he surprised me. Not the typical hero, in fact, he was a hero I was quite happy to read about. This need to prove himself yet this vulnerability that showed him in that awkward stage of not quite being a man yet not quite a boy. His knowledge of
Godspeedyet ignorance of real-earth balanced out Amy's lack of understanding about life in space. Together he and Amy take that step from childhood to adulthood, and Revis captured this transition so lovely, but in such a subtle manner you didn't even notice.
Elder's journey is intertwined with Amy’s, each chapter of the novel swapping between the two and their perspectives, allowing me as a reader to see this, pardon the pun, universe Revis has created so completely that I am now torn on who to clap and scream and shout for the most.
This is a novel with a bit of everything; mystery, murder, suspense, love and outer-space. I am keen to see how Revis pulls us deeper into this world with the sequel,
A Million Suns.
Four ink drops out of five!
