- One of my favorite authors, Jackson Pearce, talked about this book in one of her video-podcasts. I had to read it after she hyped it up!
- Delirium by Lauren Oliver
- The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Summary from GoodReads:
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.
My Review:
I read this book in four hours. Well, four hours and 30 minutes because 15 pages from the end I had to leave to pick kids up from school and I was chomping at the bit to get back home and finish it.
Sometimes I’m a bit wary when I hear people hyping up a book. I heard about how amazing a certain series with an emo teenage girl and a creepy vampire was and I was less than impressed when I gave in and read it. I tend to like to read books before the hype starts up on them – but this one.. the hype had started months before its actual release.
So when I saw it in the bookstore I picked it up, was somewhat put off by how shiny the cover was (something I don’t like, call me weird), put it down and walked away – then I remembered I had a 20% off coupon and decided – what the heck, I can always give it away to a sibling I don’t like much. =)
That was two weeks ago. Today I picked the book up and wondered why the heck I waited so long.
Across the Universe is a sci-fi thriller filled with cause and effect of living life in a controlled environment. The story starts off with some pretty hard-hitting descriptions and only progressed from there. Amy, the teenager who has to choose whether or not to follow her parents into a sleep that would last 300 years, is a gusty 17 year old girl who is thrust into something well beyond the typical teenager life.
This book was filled with twists and turns and I gasped a few times even! I was thoroughly caught up in the story, felt every betrayal, felt the fear and the pain of various characters and was really, really sad to be closing the book on the story. That’s my biggest complaint – it was too short.
Across the Universe is a great addition to YA Fiction – and even more fantastic, it opens up the science-fiction genre in a very accessible, approachable way. My only hope is that this book inspires kids to go out and find books like Enders Game by Orson Scott Card.
Check out these review(s):
