What intrigued me about Across The Universe wasn’t the promise of yet another YA love story or even a murder mystery set aboard a generation ship. No, what intrigued me was a premise that, in my own geeky way, I’d often wondered about.

What if we could be cryogenically frozen alive? Would we dream? Would we have any sense of the passage of time? 

As a long time sci-fi geek, I’ve read plenty of stories in which the author assumes we will have this capability in the future and then uses it as a device to allow characters to travel hundreds of years across the universe to reach other planets. Beth Revis, however, is the first author (I’ve read) who actually ventures into a character’s mind while in this frozen state of animation. I won’t give away what happens–

SHIVER!

But make a note: I get all claustrophobic just thinking about it!

Another intriguing premise Beth Revis tackles is…

What if you’d lived your entire life within the confines of a spaceship, your only hope the promise that your generation would one day see landfall–only to have that hope taken away?

In Across the Universe, Beth Revis brings these two premises together and examines them through the eyes of two teens who, along the way, solve a mystery and, of course, fall in love.

Across the Universe is a fun and fascinating young adult read. While the ending felt a bit rushed, and the mystery, for me, wasn’t all that much of a mystery, the problem Beth sets up for the next installment in the series (A Million Suns), is intriguing enough to keep me hooked.

From Amazon:

A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder. 

Same Book, Different Cover

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.