1.14.2011

Across the Universe- Review

Across the Universe
by Beth Revis
Available Now
Read the first chapter
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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.


I'm so glad I read this book, I have a love of sci-fi stemming from a childhood obsession for the Aliens movie quadrology (duology at the time) starring my favorite hero of all time Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. I truly believe she would have out smarted and taken on all those beefed up boys-club action stars of the eighties. But I digress.


Part sci-fi horror, part political and moral cautionary tale (Stalin would have approved of the Eldest leadership methods), there are no straight lines  or soft edges to this story.

The claustrophobia in the ship- from the air to the populace in the ship is palpable. But also from space itself, an infinite, inhospitable vastness all around you. It's a weight that us always there when you're reading the book. There is nowhere to run, that is one of the more scarier concepts I've read in a long time.


As someone who rereads books several times, I find that while I greatly enjoyed Across the Universe, I recoil at the thought of re-reading it. I just do not have the heart to put myself through it over again, once was good enough. That being said, I will most definitely keep reading the series, it's too good and too unique to pass up.


"A horrifying and deliciously claustrophobic masterpeice thats part sci-fi, part dystophian, and entirely brilliant." Kiersten White, Paranormalcy.