Across the Universe by Beth Revis

GoodReads
398 pages, YA Dystopian
Across the Universe #1
My rating--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 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 2 cents

Okay, so I'm probably the last blogger on earth who has finally gotten to this book.  Its been sitting on my shelf for probably a year, and I finally decided to pick it up and read it this weekend.  After hosting the "Bringing YA2U", I though it was appropriate that I read one of Beth Revis's books!  I am so glad I did!  This story was not at all what I thought it was going to be. I was expecting it to be an overhyped, kind of drab kind of dystopian.  Well, that impression ended after the first chapter!

I didn't expect this book to be so creepy.  But it was, in a good way.  As I got further and further into the book, my interest was piqued.  So, imagine a HUGE spaceship with over 2,000 people on board.  Only 1 person is in charge of these people.  He has a leader-in-training, and a head doctor.  And the only person who knows all of the ship's secrets is this dictatorship style leader.  Meanwhile, all of the normal citizens (with a few expections) are like sheep.  Intelligent sheep that can keep their society running, but have no individual thoughts whatsoever.  Now you are picturing the creepiness!

In the middle of all this emerges Amy, someone from our future, but is just like us.  She's "normal", but the rest of society things she's a freak.  All except Elder (leader in training), and a few of his friends.  And while Amy is trying to come to terms with the fact that she will not see her parents for 50 years and she's stuck on this ship until then, more frozen people (not sure what else to call them!) are being murdered, like she almost was.  

Elder was the most interesting character in the book for me.  He tries to buy into this society to be a good leader.  He's not really fond of Eldest, but he respects him.  Watching him start to see another way, and start to fall in love with Amy, were the best parts of the book for me!

So this book had the creepy factor, romance, adventure, a mystery to solve, and sci-fi fantasy.  I'm not sure how you would get a more interesting plot!  I was even telling my hubby about this book, and he wants me to get it for him on audio book, so he can listen to it! That's pretty rare for him!

There were a few things I didn't like--mainly because they are disturbing images, but again, it gave us some perspective on what was really wrong with this society, like any dystopian.  But couples "mating" in the streets when "The Season" was happening, and threatening to throw someone out of the hatch into the universe if they didn't "behave" was kind of hard to read about.  But I got the author's purpose for it.

This book is ranked right up there for me on my favorite dystopians, and I read it all in one sitting!  I'm giving it 5 stars!

Quotes

“I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn't have one.”   Amy's thoughts after she glimpses the fake sky on the ship

“Power isn’t control at all — power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own.”   --Elder's thoughts

“...So, I do what any reasonable person would do when faced with a crying girl.
I get the frex out of there.” --Elder's thoughts on Amy

“He sounds like a regular Hitler to me", Amy mutters. I wonder what she means by that. Eldest has always taught me that Hitler was a wise, cultured leader for his people. Maybe that's what she means: Eldest is a strong leader, like Hitler was."  --Elder's thoughts on Amy

“A leader doesn't make pawns - he makes people.” -- Elder to Eldest

Book 2: A Million Suns, available now
Book 3: Shades of Earth
Releases January 15, 2013