Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis and a GIVEAWAY!

(From Goodreads)  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.

AGH!  This is such a mixed review for me!  Maybe I should tell what I loved and then what I didn’t love?

Wow, this book is a page turner for sure.  I was completely sucked in from the very beginning and I literally plowed my way through this book.  It was so compelling and I have to say, a bit disturbing.  It reminded me of how I felt reading the Hunger Games, the urgency to keep reading to find out what happens.  Only a very well written story can do that.  I think the characters were solid and I understood them and where they were coming from.  How crazy would it be to be frozen in one time and wake up in another time that had ideas, values and lifestyles completely backward and foreign to everything you had ever known?  Yeah, this book stays in your head.  I like that.  There is really only so much you can say without giving everything away here.

And now for what I didn’t love.  I know I am on the conservative side of reading.  I freely admit this and understand it is a difference between me and other readers.  I guess the most bothersome thing in this book for me was the whole “mating season” and how it was described.  It was disgusting and crass.  I do realize, that is exactly what the author wanted me to feel about it, but I think I would have still gotten that point without the descriptions of groping, thrusting and smells.  I just didn’t need the details and it all went on a bit long for me.  That didn’t need to be such a focal point.  If I could tweak that aspect of the book, you would have a girl who would be raving about this book. 

Something I have to say that I loved is the idea that DNA does not the entire person make.  It’s that soul, the spirit inside you that really makes you who you are.

Content wise, there is swearing and plenty of sexual situations.


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