A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.
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.
(summary from Goodreads) Recently it's been taking me about two weeks to read a book.
*gasp!*
Shocker, I know. Two weeks is a long time. But I've been really busy, okay! Anyway, my point is that I received ACROSS THE UNIVERSE on Saturday morning, started reading Saturday evening, and finished reading Monday afternoon. Because it was too good to put down!
This was a book where things just kept happening! Seriously, I kept on saying to myself, "Just one more chapter... Just one more chapter..." and before I knew it I'd read like ten more chapters! And then just when I thought the story was winding down and coming to a close, there was another shocker!! Wham!
The POV alternated with each chapter between Amy and Elder. Every now and then I got confused for a few sentences about whose mind I was in, but for the most part it was really interesting to see this new world through two different sets of eyes. And it helped with the pacing I think.
The world-building is fantastic. Beth has thought about all the details - like the fact that after generations of being away from earth, the people aboard Godspeed have developed a different accent, and they have their own colloquialisms and swear words, and they're all monoethnic because of having a small "breeding pool".
So yeah. Bottom line: wow!
