Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

genre: sci-fi, dystopia, Giver-copycat
age: YA
recommend to: people who like to read the same dystopian setup over and over
rating: 4/8 tentacles



It took me a really long time to pick this book up because the cover and title led me to believe it was somehow connected to Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical, so I avoided it. Love the movie, didn’t feel like reading about it. Finally, I realized Across the Universe was a Sci-Fi novel set on a spaceship. I’m not sure the Beatles reference does Revis any favors. It’s very literal and also mildly misleading.

If I had to pick one word to describe Across the Universe, I would choose “slow.” The action lagged often (on page 35 the plot stalls for pages of exposition: boring!) and the characters were a bit slow in the head. I figured out what was going on hundreds of pages before they even had an inkling. Perhaps this book is another sufferer of Series Syndrome, in which authors put the brakes on their plots and/or write incomplete stories in order to leave material for their unnecessary sequels. Apart from that, this book presents an interesting sci-fi scenario.

Across the Universe is divided between the perspectives of Amy, who has been frozen and loaded onto a spaceship with her parents for a 300 year journey, and Elder, who is being trained by the crotchety and distrusting current leader—Eldest—to be leader of the ship’s next generation. Red-headed Amy in space? All I could think of was Amy Pond.

There’s quite a bit of suspense on Elder’s side of things as he begins to realize that Eldest has been lying to him. The downside is, a lot of the answers to his questions are so obvious that instead of becoming eagerly invested in Elder’s search for the truth, I became overwhelmed by a desire to repeatedly slam his head into the spaceship walls and shout, “ARE YOU BLIND? HOW DO YOU NOT SEE WHAT’S GOING ON?” There was one exciting twist at the end that I did not see coming.

Amy’s point of view covers some of the time she spent frozen and mostly dead asleep which seems like it would be extremely boring, but the descriptions of her thoughts and fears have a pleasant poetry to them and I enjoyed reading these segments.

The two threads of the story—Amy’s and Elder’s—are completely separate until someone mysteriously unplugs Amy’s icebox and she wakes up. When she did, I was disconcerted by her description of Elder who we find out is much older that he sounds in his own narration. He is a ten year old living in a sixteen year-old’s body. It’s weird.

Ultimately, this book is another YA dystopia following in the now formulaic footsteps of The Giver. It features a community living blissfully unaware of history and its horrors… all except for two individuals who have been selected to lead. Sound familiar yet? Revis’s space community even has a secret method of “releasing” old people. But this is in outer space so it’s different. It’s not terrible, but it’s nothing original or exciting either.


Sequel, A Million Suns, available January 2012.