Book Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Hardcover, 398 pages

Published January 11th 2011 by Razorbill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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.


My Thoughts:

I have always loved reading mystery suspense thriller stories, where I am able to guess who is the killer and puzzle out all the other details. And with Across the Universe, it’s scifi meets the mystery/suspense/thriller I’ve always liked to read, so hurray for me! It actually took me a year or so to finally read this book. It’s been on my tbr file since I’ve seen and read reviews on it online.

Across the Universe takes us way out of our Earth comfort zone and into space. The original concept of Godspeed ship and all the other details are really really good. There’s no apocalyptic thing that happened to Earth, as I thought there was, but it’s all about the money money money just like Jessie J’s song goes. Well, that and of course power that lead the government (fuzzy details here) to build Godspeed (the ship). The story’s about sending out Godspeed ship to another “habitable planet” and bringing with it useful people like geniticist, military high ranks, agriculture experts, and all kinds of experts needed so when they arrive in the planet, they will be prepared for whatever is there. 300 years is needed to travel, and the experts are frozen cryos btw, which is not a new sound to me but equally weird concept still. There are still people living in the ship, people who unexpectedly have a thousands of acres of land and incredible science inside the ship, it’s so big my mind can’t really imagine the place. The story is narrated alternately by Amy, a cryofrozen 17-yr old girl from the Earth and Elder, the next-in-line leader of the ship. There’s a lot of power-driven madness involved, and a mystery killer of cryofrozen people on the loose, and Amy is determined to find out who it is and why.

The romance was not delved deeply but it is undeniably there, and is powerfully exalting it’s presence. lol. The mystery is what kept me going, and the original and interesting concept of the scifi novel kept me reading. And I think i’m really good in this guessing game because from the very start I knew who was the main villain, though the other details i had was inaccurate,haha.

Brilliantly written and I want to read the next one. :)



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