Book Review: Across the Universe (Across the Universe #1) by Beth Revis

Title: Across the Universe (Across the Universe #1)
Author: Beth Revis
Pages: 398
Publication: January 11, 2011
Pubisher: Razorbill
Summary taken 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.

3 STARS - I LIKED IT ENOUGH

MY REVIEW:

I can see why people raved about this book so much when it first came out. The constant twists and turns were almost as fun as a rollercoaster and the writing was very well done. While the pacing was pretty slow in the beginning, the writing itself was engaging, which helped amp up the suspense once the murders started.

However, even with the unraveling of the mysteries and lies, I still couldn't bring myself to care about the story much. My initial suspicions and guesses turned out to be true; they were pretty obvious, really. Although there were some unexpected secrets revealed, it do much of a difference to my opinion and sympathy towards the characters.

I didn't really connect with the characters much. Amy irritated me half of the time since she only looked at the past and only thought of her dad. I understand that I wouldn't want to be in her situation where everyone thought that she was liar, but I wouldn't spend most of my time wallowing in angst and constantly saying that I have to protect my parents and never actually doing anything about it.

Elder was pretty okay. He was always trying to figure out how he would be a great leader when it would be his turn in the future. That is, when he was so preoccupied with his with Amy and his "love" for her. I don't like how he had the whole "love at first sight" cliche. It didn't really seem all that believable.

While the book raises some interesting moral questions, I'm still not sure if I want to buy the sequel when it comes out.