Book review: Across the Universe

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Description from Goodreads (below) can be found here along with other reviews. Linking up with Blonde... Undercover Blonde for Book Club Friday.

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.
I don't read a whole lot of science fiction, so it's hard for me to compare, but this one seems like a really good science fiction book for someone who doesn't read science fiction.

Did that make sense?

The premise of the book is pretty cool. Amy is frozen and stuck on a ship and she'll wake up in a bajillion (ok, like 300) years and be on a new earth.

The terrifying nature of her future in that alone was enough to get me hooked.

But then you add that someone is trying to kill her, and that they might try to kill her parents too, and it turned into a book I couldn't stop reading. Not that I wanted to.

I really liked and connected with both the male and female leads of this book, which is good, because it switches perspectives between the two. Each time we left one, I was reluctant initially to leave them, but soon got sucked into the plot going on with the other, then was reluctant to leave them.

I really liked the characters I was supposed to like and hated the characters I was supposed to hate. I got pretty darn invested in this story and was definitely rooting for Elder and Amy.

There are lots lots lots of surprises constantly coming in this book. I guessed a few, but I missed more than I guessed, so Revis still managed to shock me a few times.

There's also a lot of ethical issues. Elder is the future leader of the ship, and he's faced with a lot of choices about what will be best for him as a leader and for the people he will be leading, and the choices he makes are not black-and-white issues. There's also questions of race and discussion of the benefits and difficulties that arise from difference.

I think I would recommend actually reading this one (as opposed to listening to the audio). The narrators were both really good, but (and this might be hard to explain, so bear with me) when the male character was reading, Amy's voice sounded really whiny and not likeable. But when the book was read by the woman reading Amy's parts, she was kind of BA. The disparity bothered me a bit.

I liked this book! It mostly got so-so reviews on goodreads, but I recommend it as an easy, fun read.

Have any of you read it? What did you think?