Across The Universe By Beth Revis | Book Review

This book has literally been on my TBR shelf for years. According to Goodreads,  I first added it in June 2014, and it’s a testament to the hype surrounding it that I never removed it. After my recent success in the Sci Fi genre (I’m looking at you Illuminae), I thought this book was worth a go. Plus, after seeing the trailer for Passengers, I really wanted to see if there were any huge similarities between the two stories. In reality, this book wasn’t at all what I expected and ended up being vastly disappointing. I was expecting a story about two teenagers, woken from extended sleep alone on a ship. I was expecting a story of survival, not an intergalactic murder mystery.

Let’s get right to the dissection, shall we.

We’ll start at the beginning, with the freezing process. Strangely, I was not expecting that the passengers would literally be frozen into a block fo ice, I was envisaging something a little more Alien-esque, where they go to hypersleep. This decision ended up being a lot more graphic and just generally a little too unbelievable for me. There’s no way she could have been dreaming if she was encased in ice… it just didn’t work for me.

Then, we get to Godspeed, which is essentially a cargo ship but in this novel takes on the role of a small city. The one point that I really have to highlight here is Amy’s reaction to the food. This is less a place for criticism, and more just a desire to understand. Why did Amy say the food tasted fake, it wasn’t fake! Surely, the food might have had an airplane-like quality, but even then I don’t understand why she was so consistently against it!

Speaking of Amy… I hate her. Okay, hate is a strong word, let’s go with extremely dislike. She was whiny and weak and ultimately too wrapped up in her own angst to actually do anything of use. If I were to rank her, I’d say she’s more annoying than Katniss, but less annoying that America Singer, hopefully that’ll put her into context.

Then we have Elder, the Romeo of our story. In a word, I’d describe him as ‘spineless’. It took Elder a really long time to figure out what was going on, and his angst was just as prevalent as Amy’s. Don’t even get me started on their insta-lovey relationship – possibly one of the most superficial pairings I’ve seen in a series. Elder was only interested in the fact she came from earth, while Amy was forced into his company as the only one who’d listen to her… all in all, it was just a little too flimsy for me.

(Mild spoilers ahead, not that any of this book surprised me)

I was going to say something like ‘let’s talk about suspense’, but that would imply there was suspense. What suspense? I literally didn’t find a single revelation in this book shocking, it was incredibly predictable. Not to mention the fact that Revis made it painfully obvious that this wasn’t her intention. Between the clones, drugs, engine, plague, murder etc, it is clear that Revis was trying to surprise the reader by including plot twists, but I saw every turn from a mile away.

Overall, I had to give this book a 2/5 stars (probably closer to a 2.5, but this time I had to round down, in no universe could I bring myself to give this a 3). I was really disappointed after all the good things I’d heard about this book, but I guess, in the end, it just wasn’t for me. I don’t think I’ll continue with this series, but what did you guys think? Have you read this book, the whole series, saved it to your TBR? I’ll talk to you in the comments!