OTW Challenge: ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, by Beth Revis

I've read this book in a Spanish translation

Quite interesting YA Sci-Fi

Published: 2011

Genre: Sci-Fi/YA

My Rating: 3 stars

Part of a series: Across the Universe #1

I discovered this book because it was chosen as a RT Seal of Excellence, and later on, it received the RT Reviewers Choice Award in the category Young Adult Paranormal Novel.

This is a YA book, with two main characters, Amy and Elder, both of them teenagers. Each chapter is told in first person, alternating Amy’s and Elder’s voices.

So who is Amy? She’s a cryogenically frozen passenger in a spaceship. Both her parents and she have been frozen in order to wake up hundreds of years later in another planet. But something happens fifty years before arriving to the new Earth – Amy’s cryo chamber is unplugged and she awakens.

And who is Elder? Well, the spaceship is a society organized with one leader for each generation. The Eldest is the actual –and tyrannical- leader and the teenager Elder is his pupil, somebody who is learning to be the leader of the following generation.

The plot has a little bit of that ‘fish out of water’ sensation, which allows you to discover the strange society that has been created after two centuries travelling through space. At the same time you feel the awkwardness of not knowing what you’re going to do with your life, because nothing is going as you expected. The things get from bad to worse when they discover that somebody is trying to kill all those people that are frozen, like Amy’s parents. Even Amy’s life is in danger. So there’s a little bit of a suspense sub-plot.

Dec-2011

Razorbill

I quite enjoyed this book. It was a little bit slow at the beginning, and I'm not sure I was quite into the feelings of these two teenagers, but the world building was great and I had to keep on reading to discover the secrets of this spaceship and how everything was going to end. So it’s quite an entertaining YA Sci-Fi, the kind of book I do rarely read.

I guess that sooner or later, I will try and read the rest of the books in this series. 

And if you are wondering about the boring cover in the Spanish translation, I'd tell you that it had a much nicer cover, the one that originally was published by Razorbill in March 2011 -not the one on the left but the other one with two profiles-, but somehow the owner of that book (not me) has made it dissappear.