Across the Universe by Beth Revis

#1 in the Across the Universe series
Published January 11, 2011 by Razorbill
2 Stars

Goodreads Review
A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.

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. 

Review:  Look at this cover.  Look at it.  It is phenomenal.  Seriously, take off the words and I'd hang that on my wall.  But sadly I cannot say the story inside the book was as wildly exciting as the cover.  I rarely think that books are overwritten, but There were so many plot twists it got to be too much and I found myself figuring out everything long before they were revealed and rolling my eyes. 

The biggest problem in Across the Universe is world building, as is often the case with lack luster science fiction.  I did not understand why there needed to be a society of people to maintain the ship in the first place.  Couldn't there be a group of frozen technicians who are awaken at certain intervals?  Couldn't most of the ship's functions be run by computers?  Also, what was the point in the mission at all?  I don't remember if that was explained but I never really knew why Amy and her parents were frozen in the first place. 

I found myself really disliking Elder and Amy, the two main characters.  I felt like there wasn't anything special enough about either of them to make them stand out and I couldn't relate.  Amy was particularly bland.  I came away from the novel knowing she was different because she had red hair, liked track and field, and spent a lot of time whining about her parents, her ex-boyfriend, and how different life on the ship is.  I got a bit of a better feeling for Elder, mostly because he had the opportunity to develop as he learns more about Eldest and the deceptions of the ship's government.  What really bothered me about these characters was how terrible things could happen to them but then they'd get over it in a matter of minutes.  Amy, in particular, had some very unbelievable reactions.  The romance between these two was boring and poorly paced.  By the time they finally meet we're a third of the way through the book and I found it very difficult to care. 

There were some good themes in Across the Universe, namely does quality of life matter if something can survive?  It questions government control through various means: medicinal, class structure, and religion.  It was like Revis had these great ethical themes that were bogged down with poorly built science fiction and tiresome romance. 

Across the Universe looks like a beautiful romance set in outer space, but don't let that cover fool you.  The book plods along with a clunky and more than slightly creepy romance and while there are some huge plot twists, they're hinted at with extremely obvious clues and then solved with extremely convenient solutions.  This would have been a one star read, but that stunning cover is worth a star all on it's own.