The best way to describe Across the Universe by Beth Revis is that it's a mash-up of The Giver and Uglies with a bit of Wall-E thrown in there.
Odd, I know. But I love all three of those things, which tells you that this is a good book.
It's the first in a planned trilogy, which I'm thankful for, since that helps me overlook some of the issues I had with the book. Across the Universe tells the story of Amy, a girl who is cryogenically frozen with her parents to go on a spaceship to terraform a new planet, Centauri-Earth. This journey will take 300 years, hence the freezing. However, Amy is pulled out of her state 50 years too soon--and the only way that could have happened is if someone tried to murder her. When she awakens, she meets a boy named Elder, who is in training to be the warden of the ship she is on. Elder is in the midst of discovering secrets about the ship and his role in its leadership. The book is told through the alternating perspectives of Elder and Amy.
There is a lot to love about this book. It's original, and it's got a great tone to it. Revis does a great job of letting your emotions follow along with Amy and Elder's. And I think Revis does a FANTASTIC job of writing Amy's emotions. Amy is 17, so it would be real easy for this book to devolve into melodrama. But Amy's reactions to major events in her life are very earnest, and her struggles with her feelings for her old boyfriend, Jason (even though, logically, she knows he's dead by the time she wakes up), ring true. It's refreshing to see a heroine who isn't boy-crazy, but isn't totally without romantic feelings. You know, someone who actually acts like a 17-year-old girl. It's definitely one of the book's strongest points.
I can't talk a lot about Elder without giving away a lot of the book, so let me put it this way: considering the context that Revis has placed him in, she's done an excellent job at capturing that sort of character.
My major complaint is not with the story itself, but with the telling of it. There are few instances where the writing isn't as smooth as it should be. For instance, on the whole ship, there is only one medical doctor. This isn't really made clear until later in the book, so when Elder calls him "Doc" and Amy calls him "the doctor," I was confused as to who each was actually talking about. I get that that's not terribly major, but sometimes it's the little things, you know?
The book does take awhile to get started, but as soon as I read this exchange, I was hooked:
"He sounds like a regular Hitler to me," Amy mutters.
I wonder what she means by that. Eldest 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.
My other beef relates to the fact that while all the major questions are answered, they're done in such a way that I'm not even sure if they're all answered. The answers are a bit muddled. Even now that I'm finished with the book, I'm still left with a lot of questions. Actually, now that I think about it, there is one mystery that wasn't solved. It was mentioned at the beginning of the book and never mentioned again after Amy is pulled out of stasis. It's nothing huge, per se, but the way it was presented makes me think that it was important.
And there was this great big buildup to the "secret" of the ship, and when we finally learn what it is, everything happens so fast and action is taken that I don't really have time to process it all correctly. And since it did happen so quickly, I didn't really feel like there was any "true" danger for our protagonists. I had only just grasped the severity of the conflict, and as soon as that happened, it was all over. In fact, during the reveal, I began to see the Big Bad's side of the issue--and that maybe they weren't so wrong in their way of thinking. That's not a bad thing. Just something to consider. However, this leads me to believe that Revis has something bigger and better planned for books 2 and 3, so I'm remaining cautiously optimistic at this point.
There was a bit of a random plot twist thrown in at the end (that I halfway suspected at various points during the novel), which definitely adds to the story, but it seems VERY thrown in there at the last minute. It doesn't feel out of place, per se, but it's not necessarily integrated into the story all that well, either. Like, there are things that happen earlier in the novel that don't make any sense considering what you learn at the end. It's a bit of sloppy writing, but since it is such a good, believable twist, I'm willing to overlook it.
And then Elder says something in the last chapter he narrates that kind of sours my opinion of him. It's not so much WHAT he says, but how Revis has written it. Because what he says actually makes sense within the context of the story and is absolutely believable for his character. But it's somewhat devoid of context and that makes for a bit of character assassination on his part. However, I'm sure it will be addressed in the later books, so I'm going to let it go for the time being.
This is a dystopian novel, and I liked how it didn't go straight from dystopia to utopia. No society is perfect. There will be problems--and that's what the subsequent books in this series will address--at least, I hope they will!
This book is definitely worth reading. In terms of how I felt while reading it, it reminded me a lot of The Host, which is easily one of my favorite Sci-Fi novels. So basically, that's a glowing recommendation from me. As this post attests, this book is not without a few minor faults, but if you read it with the idea that it's part of a trilogy, those faults are easy to get past.
Books Read: 5/100
Currently Reading: Between books
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