“A leader doesn’t make pawns – he makes people.”
― Beth Revis, Across the Universe
Synopsis : Amy is a cryogenically frozen passenger aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed. She expects to awaken on a new planet, 300 years in the future. But fifty years before Godspeed‘s scheduled landing, Amy’s cryo chamber is unplugged. . .
Now, Amy is caught inside an enclosed world where nothing makes sense.Godspeed‘s passengers have forfeited all control to Eldest, a tyrannical and frightening leader, and Elder, his rebellious and brilliant teenage heir.All she knows is that she must race to unlock Godspeed‘s hidden secrets before whoever woke her tries to kill again.
I was a little nervous about starting this book because I’ve always been wary of true to form sci-fi, and my previous adventure in sci-fi “spaceship” YA fiction didn’t go very well. However, Across The Universe has changed my mind completely.
Amy is a teenage girl about to go on a 300-year road trip with her parents while frozen-in-time. But while Amy sleeps nothing is ever what it is set out to be. Elder, the teenage second-in- command leader of the ship, world changes when Amy wakes up a few years to early and turns his life around.
The plot hits the ground running, and we are thrown into the futuristic and dystopian world of the Godspeed. 250 years into its 300-year-old voyage.
The plot of the book is really fascinating if not nightmare inducing. I did notice that the narration had a lot of spoon-feeding in it, in which characters narration would explain every mystery and little thing that was happening in the course of the novel and this really took me out of the story.
I understand a lot of criticism for this book comes from how unrealistic the science is, and maybe because I have a “seems legit” attitude about science fiction I can easily hand-wave it.
When the tagline says “A spaceship fueled on lies”, they are not kidding. The ending of this novel was gripping and ingeniously plotted, I have to give it to Revis my mouth was hanging open at the end.
As I like to state in a lot of my reviews this is not a romance focused novel, despite what the hardcover edition synopsis says. This is really a story of power, truth and what it means to survive when it’s just you and the stars.
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1/2 of the blogging duo at Books and Sensibility, I have been blogging about and reviewing books since 2011. I read any and every genre, here on the blog I mostly review Fantasy, Adult Fiction, and Young Adult with a focus on audiobooks.