Blurb: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:I didn't like this book at first. It started off with a bang, but then I realized there were a lot of similarities between this book and Maria V. Snyder's Insider books. And I couldn't help but think how much I enjoyed Inside Out, but I wasn't enjoying Across the Universe quite as much. I am a huge Maria V. Snyder fan. So my opinion comes with a little bias, but I still think her take on this topic was way better. That being said though, as the reading continued, it did start to grow on me. I thought the imagery and descriptions in this book were fantastic. I didn't even need that map of the Godspeed. Sure it helped to visualize what the ship looked like a little better, but I actually did it pretty well on my own. That was definitely one of this book's strengths. And it's also one of my favorite things to come across in books.The writing was decent, but it didn't stand out for any reason and I must admit that the characters were a little flat. They just didn't feel real to me. I didn't think Amy had much of a personality. I liked Elder a little more, but I wasn't swooning over him or anything. I want my characters to jump off the page and I want to really care for them, and that part of the story worked okay, but could have been much better.The plot. Oh my God, the plot. This is where this book blew me away. Most of the time I never knew what was going to happen next or what was coming. Based on who the villain ended up being, you think I would have been able to figure that out, but no, I didn't. And I love that!! I love when I am surprised at the end. I loved that things were almost ALWAYS not what they seemed. I haven't had that happen to me while reading in some time. I love being surprised, and um, with the number of books that I read on a regular basis, this doesn't happen as much as it used to. I have caught on to almost all of the writer's tricks, and Beth Revis was able to fool me. After about page 81, my heart was in my throat for most of the rest of the book. So do I think you should read it? Definitely! It's not the best book of 2011 by any means, but it was a great read! I now know why everyone is freaking out over the A Million Suns ARCS that are going around. I wouldn't mind having one myself. This was one crazy and well plotted out story.
