Sunday, February 13, 2011

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Genre: Young adult, dystopia, sci-fi
FTC Disclosure: borrowed from local library
Published: 2011
Pages: 398
Content: Adult situations, nothing really offensive.

Description from Goodreads.com:
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.

This looked like a fantastic read, a sci-fi/dystopia, and a beautiful cover!!! I knew it was going to be great....OK, not so much.

Good Things: The story is interesting. I liked the plot of a teen getting unfrozen before her time and coming to grips with a new life and a crazy dystopian regime on a spaceship. Revis could have gone a lot of place with this one.

Bad Things: The sad thing is the story could have been so much better, everything could have been so much better. The main characters Amy and Elder were pretty one-dimensional and I didn't really care much about them. Another thing, Revis kept bringing religion and non-religion into her storyline...like since this is a totalitarian regime they must not believe in God anymore because only nonbelievers are cruel and eat babies or something and think Hitler was the best leader in the world and would white wash world Earth history....sigh. I also didn't like her views on sex and love...Amy kept being ashamed of herself and feeling guilty about stuff. This book really felt like a really weird Sunday school parable lesson.

The story could have been great but the delivery was poor. I'm not planning on picking up the next ones...maybe I'll just cheat and read the last chapters.


Rating: 2/5 stars

2 comments:

  1. It's always a shame when a book you think is going to be great turns out to be a disappointment.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've been wanting to read this. Such a shame it doesn't live up to the hype.

    ReplyDelete

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