Amy and her parents have joined the couple of thousand people that will travel three hundred years across space to a new planet. Frozen in cryogenic boxes, they will be asleep for the whole trip. Something goes wrong though, and Amy is woken up fifty years too early. Someone aboard the spaceship Godspeed is killing off the people in cryo! Now Amy needs to find out who’s the killer before they get to her still frozen parents. But the mystery of the killings is just one of the many secrets aboard Godspeed.I came to read this book thinking is was a simple YA romance space story, and what happened was that the book came alive and slapped with mystery, and conflict, and all kinds of awesome. I mean, frex. Just the beginning with Amy’s nightmares and ‘dreams’ in cryo, had me hooked. This is no Star Trek or Star Wars were people live happily inside a badass looking spaceship with all kinds of amazing technology. No! This is the harsh reality of living is space for more than a hundred years.For Amy the ship feels like a cage. The carefully constructed landscapes, the huge lamp that’s supposed to be their sun, are all just bad imitations of reality, of what she remembers of Earth. And though Elder has never seen Earth, he feels that things should be more. He says “the one thing I can’t stand about life aboard the ship: the perfect evenness of everything.” Eldest, the leader of the people, is a tyrant, spewing nonsense about monoethnicity, and causes of discord. Hah from the beginning I knew the third cause of discord, even if Eldest didn’t because is something that I value above all. Even if he is doing the things he is doing for what he thinks is the better of the people, he still doing things wrong. The last part of the book was just a barrage of surprises and unveilings. I swear I probably screamed OMG more than 10 times. And the ending! Love, love, love it! Now that’s how things are done in relationships, through honesty and communication. I’m so glad by Amy’s reaction to Elder’s confession. No one is perfect, we all make mistakes. She is willing to work through it with him, because he had the decency to come clean about it. Across the Universe was such a thrill to read. There was never a dull moment with all the secrets and weird things going on in the ship. The main characters are very well written, each POV can be quickly identified by their voice. I also liked some of the secondary characters, and would have liked to see more of them. Overall, I would recommend this to all YA sci-fi and dystopia fans.
