Across the Universe

Across the Universe
Author: Beth Revis
Series: Across the Universe (#1)
Publisher: Razorbill
How Received: bought

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.

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I should preface this by saying that I'm a character girl. I can overlook a predictable plot or even a bad plot if the characters are good enough.

Revis writes good characters -- Elder is likeable and even admirable enough at times, and I completely admired the way Amy handled her situation (and her character as a whole, for that matter). They're the reason I kept pushing through the book and finishing it. Normally I hate dual point-of-views; in this case, I think it worked out really well.

Revis also creates a really dynamic world -- I liked seeing how the ship was built and modified and everything.

But when it came to the plot, I wanted something a little... more.

The reason I picked up Across the Universe was because of Revis as a person; I knew she was a Browncoat and a Whovian and she's a smart person. Whedon's writing-style in FIREFLY clearly influenced the writing here, and whether that was intentional or accidental, I'm not sure.

But perhaps it's because I'm so used to trying to figure out Whedon's plot twists -- perhaps it's because I was able to read instead of watching -- perhaps it's because I'm an observant reader --

-- whatever it was, I found the whole thing fairly predictable and stale.

It's not a bad book by any means; the writing and the main characters make up for the lack of plot finesse, at least enough to finish the story. But I had the entire thing figured out a fourth of the way into the book. Not a single reveal, all undoubtedly dramatic to those who didn't figure it out, surprised me at the end. Rather, I was... bored. I was more curious as to how Elder and Amy were going to handle their precarious relationship than who had tried to kill half the people cyrogenically frozen.

And honestly? That's a problem for me. Because I like shipping characters and investing myself in relationships as much as the next girl, but if I'm more interested in a couple I think would do better as friends than how the story ends, there's something else that I needed.

Overall Rating & Final Comments: 6/10. Good characters, good world, lacking plot. May pick up the sequel simply because the future seems less predictable for them.
Cover Comments: I have the hardcover and it has TWO SIDES. Expect a Friday Fronts post in the future!



Have you read Across the Universe? What did you think?