Rachel Rambles About Across The Universe

So I'm taking a break from all my Project For Awesome video-watching to ramble about the book I just finished, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE by Beth Revis.

From Goodreads:
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

Basically, this book was frexing awesome and totally not what I expected. Honestly, I kind of thought it would be all steamy-romance-making-out-swoon-and-by-the-way-there-are-aliens-too.

And okay, I was so wrong.

First of all, I have to say that I'm normally not a science fiction person. I don't hate it or anything, I just haven't read a lot of it. But this book intrigued me, so I shrugged and added it to my to-read list.

This is one of those books that, if I think about it for too long, my brain starts to hurt. I mean, they're in SPACE. In the FUTURE. And they...they were FROZEN. It's kind of a difficult concept to get past if you're someone like me, who wants to know everything that happened on Earth during all this time and who needs to understand how this stuff is PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE. And not knowing is frustrating and mind boggling  and scary but also kind of amazing.

The writing itself is done in such a unique and interesting way. Each chapter switches points of view from Amy to Elder. Amy is a really likable character, and her voice is real and easy to relate to. Also, she's pretty badass. At least in my opinion. And I love badass protagonists. Elder has been living on the Gospeed for all his life, so the way he thinks and acts is a lot different from what readers are familiar with. It took me a while to like him, but as I got to know him better, I was able to understand and relate to him. And love him.

Obviously, Elder and Amy are destined to fall in love. Duh. What I really liked, though, was the fact that their relationship is not the main focus of the book. In fact, it's really not important at all in comparison to everything else that happens. It's really more of a budding romance, hinting at what will come in the next two books. It was surprisingly refreshing to read a book that doesn't center around kissing and swooning and cute boys and forbidden love.

Wait. Did I really just SAY that?! Oh man, you guys. It's like I'm a whole new person.

But anyway, I am not saying that there's not kissing or romance or anything. Because there is. But it kind of takes a backseat to the whole we're-on-a-spaceship-living-in-a-dystopian-society-and-there's-a-bunch-of-frozen-people-and-people-are-dying-and-everything-is-chaos.

My point is that this book is freaking frexing awesome. There were moments that made me gasp and moments that made me tear up. And the entire time, my brain was working in overdrive to try to process ALL OF THE THINGS THAT WERE HAPPENING. 
I can't wait to read A Million Suns.

-Rachel