Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Across the Universe #1

"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, 300 years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end 50 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."

Oh.. wow. Just wow. I knew this book was popular, but I guess I just wasn't expecting it to be this good. The first couple chapters were a little slow, but it was all very important set ups. I need, need the sequel like right now. Amy and Elder are fantastic characters. Two very different people from two different worlds trying and succeeding at reaching the same goals. Equals in their own rights.

Their dynamic is so interesting, he is clearly smitten with her. She has red hair, pale skin, and green eyes. All very different from the dark tan skin and dark hair and eyes from the rest of the people on the ship. It seems to help his case that she is the only girl he's ever seen that was his age at the same time has he. It's adorable and naive how jealous and possessive he gets over Amy so quickly, like she is already his even though they don't really know anything about one another. It's cute and becomes extremely obvious that he is very inexperienced when it comes to the ladies, he has moments of weird awkwardness, but it's a little endearing, but from what I gathered, Amy had sex with her boyfriend from earth before she got on the ship, as a way of saying goodbye.

The ship, Godspeed, has a lot of secrets, and Eldest and the Doctor are a pair of sociopaths, at least Eldest is. The Doc is just a sheep. A booktuber mentioned the disgusting mating rituals they had, I wasn't sure what to expect.. but it wasn't that. Just.. ew, it's not descriptive, but it's still pretty gross. But that was really hardly the worst that their leader, Eldest, was doing with the ship's people. Making them all into sheep was really the worst thing.

Even though this book is set in space, I really like the mystery aspect of the story more than the Sci-fi/Romance part. The romance was very awkward and hardly returned. There weren't really any surprises, I never expected the story to take the turns it did, the way it did. The person behind all the shenanigans was not who I thought it was. This book was a great read, and if I had more of a life and liked to sleep more, I wouldn't have finished this book as fast as I did. I highly recommend this book.