Review: Across The Universe

Title:  Across the Universe
Author:  Beth Revis


     From GoodReads, "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."

     The first thing that I have to admit is that when I first read the description of the book, I wasn't too excited about reading it.  I liked the cover, but the premise of the book seemed a little strange.  A girl that is cryogenically frozen?  Doesn't that sound a little odd or at least something Walt Disney or Ted Williams would do?  I'm not a huge fan of science fiction/fantasy, but have been reading more in this genre lately and liking some of the books that I have read (Hunger Games, Twilight, and the Chaos Walking series), but I wasn't sure if I could make the jump to this book.  I finally decided to give it a try and from the opening chapter it caught my attention and kept it throughout the entire book.  I was right that the book is strange and there are a lot of concepts that were difficult to think about, but I truly underestimated this book before reading it.  

     The book is told from alternating perspectives between a teenage girl (Amy) that is cryogenically frozen and later is woken up on a starship and the future leader of the ship (Elder).  I really enjoyed both these characters and the dilemmas they are faced with.  Both of the characters are likable and realistic.  Which is strange to say when the whole book takes place in a world that is completely different from our own.  It was great to see characters written with such depth.  I loved the fact that the characters in this book were never truly good or evil, there was some aspect of both in the characters that made me identify with all of them in some way or another and made them human.  

     This book was full of mystery, suspense, and romance and left me wanting to know more about the characters and what happens next.  I am hoping that this is a first book in a sequel or trilogy and that readers are able to hear more from debut novelist Beth Revis.  Outstanding work from beginning to end!