Beth Revis' debut novel, Across the Universe, is a captivating mystery that keeps you guessing until the end.
Summary from Goodreads.com:
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.
Granted, the summary says there is romance in the story. For me, I saw the tiniest sliver of it. Mostly from the character, Elder.
For this book, I read it because I had heard a lot of good things about it (usually why I read the books I do), but about halfway through the story I really just wanted the story to be finished. I was only intrigued by the mystery side of the story and wanted to see how it all turned out. Luckily for me, it all turned out very different than what I was guessing. Doesn't mean I will tell you how the book ends. That would just be plain mean.
We get the two main character point of views in this story. Amy--the girl who was frozen with her parents and expecting to wake up on a new Earth-like planet, and Elder--the future leader of the ship Godspeed. When Amy wakes up fifty years earlier, that was the first thing that caught my attention. If I was Amy, I'd be angry and upset, as anyone would be. Now she would be older than her parents when they woke up.
Beth is an incredible descriptive setting writer. Every room, every building, every part of the story, including the stars are all beautiful and I feel like I'm on Godspeed walking around. However, there are aspects of the story that I felt were unnecessary to the story, but may be a major player in the next couple stories that come next.
Only one character I found to be enlightening and had any real development throughout the whole story. And that is Elder's best friend on the ship--Harley. He is the one character that the reader can relate to in the entire story. I love Harley and he will be a character that really stands out to me for a long time. Very memorable, very good Harley.
I really can't write much else as a review on this because the only things I like are the descriptions of setting, the mystery and Harley. This story doesn't do much for me as a reader in entertaining me. I had a really hard time and pushed myself to the end but if you like science fiction, try this story. Give it a go. You may like it more than I did.
Dunno, I am just getting one big meh
ReplyDelete