Review of Across the Universe – Book 1 of KINDLE Ebook Across the Universe series By Beth Revis

This was recommended as a cracking generational ship read during a discussion about this science fiction sub-genre, so I went looking for it…

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.

This YA adventure is set on a generational ship and the two protagonists are Amy and Elder, the leader-in-waiting, who is being groomed to take over running the ship by the cynical, short-fused Eldest, who brooks no opposition. When Amy is woken decades earlier before the ship is due to land, she quickly realises it was an attempt to kill her – and when other stored personnel are murdered in the same way, she is desperate to protect her parents, still frozen in the hold of the ship. Meantime, she now has to try and fit in with the other inhabitants of the ship – a far taller order than you might think, given that everyone else on board is genetically very similar to each other, and with her pale skin and auburn hair, she immediately stands out.

We learn about the trammelled society aboard Godspeed through Amy’s appalled eyes and Elder’s increasing restlessness at Eldest’s autocratic pronouncements. It’s nicely done and the sense of claustrophobia experienced by Amy as she realises she will spend most of her life aboard this ship, is vividly portrayed. I liked her efforts to discover who is murdering the frozen personnel who are stored in the ship’s hold as she continues to come to terms with what is going on.

Meanwhile, Elder becomes increasingly distracted by her to Eldest’s fury, though he is also struck by how attached she is to her parents – which leaves him feeling isolated as the custom is that the ship’s Eldest never knows who his parents are to prevent any dynastic ruling family taking control. Revis continually provides us with a steady dripfeed of answers while posing the next layer of question. This book steadily ramps up the stakes as the extent to which Godspeed has deviated from the original mission becomes apparent.

Of course, in order for this story structure to be really successful, the reveal has to pay off. We have to be amazed and/or appalled at the denouement and feel it was worth the book-long wait. Revis handled this beautifully – she produces the big twist at the end and just as I was coming to terms with how this is overcome, she gives us yet another big game-changer. I really enjoyed the way this played out, transforming this book from an 8 into a 9. The good news is that the next two books A Million Suns and Shades of Earth are available and I can see why this book garnered a shedload of nominations for awards when it was first released in 2011.
9/10