Book Review: Across the Universe

Title: Across the universe
Author: Beth Revis
Series: Across the Universe #1 
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adult, Dystopian
Publisher: Razorbill (Penguin)
Publication Date: January 2011
Hardcover: 400 pages
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars

Synopsis:

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 awake 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 a 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 Review:

I love science-fiction and I love books on space travelling. That's why Across the Universe was a must-read for me. I have read a few young adult dystopian books and I have to say, I enjoyed this one as well. It would have gotten 4 stars, but I found the story was a bit predictable.

Amy is put into cryogenic freeze with her parents and placed aboard a spaceship called Godspeed. They have been chosen to be a part of an important space mission that is to travel to a far distant world called Centauri-Earth, which the spaceship is destined to arrive in 300 years after the take-off.

Amy is still somewhat conscious while in ice.

And I think it's an unimaginable horror to be awake consciously for such a long period.
But due to some unknown reasons, Amy has been awakened 50 years earlier then what was scheduled regarding her cryogenic sleep. 

She finds herself in a strange society on the spaceship.

Eldest is the ship leader who rules through strict hierarchy. While Elder is being trained to become the next leader. There was a "love at first side" with Amy and Elder.
Amy struggles to adjust with the strange life on the spaceship but her cultural differences, her fair skin and red hair mark her as an alien on the monoethnic ship where everyone looks and behaves alike.

Soon she realizes someone is unplugging the cryogenic containers and killing the frozen people. She attempts to solve the mystery and find the murderer before he strikes again.

THE GOOD: The beginning has an indelible imprint.
The concept of cryogenic freezing was quite distinct and I found it to be really cool.

THE BAD: How could Eldest and the doctor not question the existence of Orion? I mean he was in the same ship for 17 years. How could they not know?

Plus I didn't really connect with the main characters, Amy and Elder.
I tried so hard to like them but I couldn’t. They were a bit childish to be honest.

Amy: I hate Amys' over exaggerated behavior. 

Amy was mostly concerned about her Daddy and didn't quite care about her mom.

She seemed selfish at one point when she went down to unplug her parents, knowing that her parents gave up everything for the future. She knew that one could hear everything while in ice, yet she didn't bother to hold back her whining.

Elder: I think Elders' infatuation with Amy made him blind towards his duties. And since Eldest and Orion are dead. It is quite concerning how these two teenagers could carry the weight of such a duty.

Romance between Amy and Elder:

No spark in the romance. No chemistry between them. There was a loophole in their love story.
The writer has been very hasty with the story line. The book should have had more details. Other than that there were a lot of small incidents which were not well defined. For example, what happened to Luthe and the rape scene?

Harley: Cool character. He kills himself by ejecting out into space because of his feelings of claustrophobia.

Format:
The dual POV was quite helpful as it allows for an objective viewpoint. Amys' POV helped us to understand what it is like to live on the ship as an outsider. And how the life on the ship is different from the life on Earth.