Book Review: Across the Universe

Title: Across the Universe (Across the Universe #1)
Author: Beth Revis
Publisher: Razorbill
Publication Date: January 11, 2011
Genre: Young Adult // Sci-Fi // Romance // Dystopia
Format: Audio Book
Source: Library


 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 (goodreads).



A beautiful tale of loneliness, acceptance, and forgiveness. Across the Universe took my breath away and I cannot wait to see how this universe continues to expand. 



Plot: Across the Universe begins in Present Day NYC in which Amy has to make a very difficult choice - be frozen for 300 hundred years with her parents or run away and continue living her life - without her parents. Life would have been all fine and dandy and if hadn't been woken up 50 years too early, thus leading her to experience a whole new culture and to solve the mystery of who woke her up. I was never bored with Across the Universe thanks to the steady pacing as well as the nuggets of information the Revis gives us to show the differences between Our World and the future. 

Characters: Amy has the spunk and the curiosity that I live for in YA novels. Her gravity of her situation makes her seem older than she actually is and I loved seeing her grow and adapt to the strange culture on GodSpeed. Elder does not start off as mature as Amy does but he does grow to become a strong leading role. 

To help support Amy and Elder, Revis has created a remarkable cast of characters who have their own motivation and agenda. What I loved most about Revis' characters is that, while there are decidedly "evil" characters, there is a method behind their madness, as well as logic. 

World Building: I knew from Body Electric that Beth Revis had a way with words when it came to building the scene and for a giant spaceship, she did a fantastic job! Beth Revis describes the world by utilizes all five senses, The world is properly captured through Amy's eyes as she is the outsider and can easily point out all of the differences. 

Audiobook Performance: Lauren Ambrose does a fantastic job portraying Amys sense of loneliness in this strange new world. Most of her dialogue is delivered in a monotone voice which can only be described as a girl who is lost. Carlos Santos as won my heart as a male narrator, he had a wide range of emotion and urgency in his delivery, and his female voices were pretty believable.  

Short N Sweet: Across the Universe has shown me a whole new world/universe that I cannot wait to continue exploring. The true magic in this novel is the growth that Elder and Amy experience as they are forced to make adult decisions. 

Labels: , , , ,