Across the Universe by Beth Revis
is about a seventeen year old girl who is cryogenically frozen so that she can
go on a mission to new earth with her parents 300 years into her future. The
girl, Amy, gets reanimated 50 years to early and is thrown into the world that
exists on the spaceship that she has been traveling on. Amy meets the future
leader of the people who lives on the ship named Elder and together they begin
to discover that the society that has been created within these steel walls isn’t
what it should be.
Across the Universe started out
pretty good, the first few chapters drew me into the story and I was interested
in the characters. Unfortunately, about half way through the book there was a
turn of events that turned me off and I didn’t really enjoy the book from then
on. The incident, which I won’t describe in case someone wants to read this
book, seemed unnecessary and I feel like the same effect could have been achieved
in a different way. I think that the reason that I didn’t like the incident was
because it was too graphic for a young adult novel. I could have done without
this certain part and I wish that Beth Revis had written it differently.
The characters were alright in
this book, there really were only five characters in the entire story. The
chapters are divided between the two main characters Amy and Elder and I’m not
sure how much I liked either of them. Amy seemed weak to me, she emerged into
this completely different world from the one she knew and started to notice
things that were right. However, she doesn’t really start to talk about those
things until after the incident, when it directly affected her. After Amy
noticed how things were different she never really tried to explain why things
on the ship weren’t right, she just said that were right. Never once did Amy do
something heroic or out of character, it seemed like her only purpose on the
ship was to stir things up.
Elder had lived on the ship for
his entire life and just started to realize that the way things were being run
might be corrupt and even after his realization he still often agreed with the
corrupt side. I did like Elder better then Amy because he was acting out of
turn and was trying to get answers, he had a rebellious side. The thing that I
really liked about Elder is that he seemed to put everyone else’s well being
ahead of himself. It was right at the end of the book that I ended up not
liking Elder as much, he did something that made me think about the story
completely different. It was the one thing that ruined Elder for me and also
ruined the book a bit as well.
The other characters are hardly
worth mentioning, they are the stock people that you expect in a story of this
sort. There was the best friend, the bad guy and the bad guy’s henchman. Other
than that there was the mindless masses that had no idea that anything life
changing was happening. The characters were a bit predictable, and not at all
interesting.
The writing was ok, but near the
end it seemed to be overly emotional. I feel like that whole feel of Across the
Universe is that it started out good and then it end really bad. I’m not sure
that I want to continue reading the rest of the books in the trilogy. To me I
can’t see where the story could possibly go after this; I honestly can’t
believe that there are two more books written about these characters.
I gave Across the Universe a three
out of five because I really did enjoy the beginning of the book, but I really
did hate the end of the book.
