Review Detail

Across the Universe opens with a very detailed and vivid scene where one of the book’s two point-of-view characters, Amy, watches her parents go into cryo-sleep and then undergoes the painful procedure herself. I’ve always been equally disgusted and fascinated by medical stuff, so I don’t think there could have been a more attention-grabbing hook than this one, personally.

From there, the story continues on in fast-paced chapters that alternate between Amy and Elder’s point of view. I was pretty hooked, I must say. Because there were two POV characters, Revis was able to end on a cliffhanger with one chapter and then go to a completely different part of the story in the next, so it was like a double cliffhanger (or something). I always wanted to keep reading and see what happened next. With this book, there’s really no good stopping place.

Bottom line for Across the Universe’s plot? It’s at once compelling and predictable. I knew from chapter 4 who the “mystery antagonist” was—Revis wasn’t subtle with her foreshadowing or hints. Might as well have been a big sign. But I wanted to keep reading; the twists in the plot kept things really interesting. I don’t mind predictibility if it’s well-handled, it seems.
I also really liked the dystopian spaceship that Revis created in this novel. It was all very cohesively done, sickening at times, true, but well done. It was obvious that a lot of thought went into this book, and I appreciated the believable wordlbuilding and engaging setting.

Amy and Elder were both very interesting characters. I liked them a lot, and I wanted to see how they turned out. However, characterization is not Revis’s strongpoint, and while she created two interesting, likeable characters, they seemed to lack depth. I understood what they were doing and why they were reacting and what their motivations were, but the bottom layer—the part that would have made them human—was missing.

Considering that this book takes place in the space of less than a week, I was a bit skeptical of the promised “love” between Elder and Amy. And in the end, I was satisfied for the most part—there were no declarations of undying love or mushy kissing scenes. Amy was realistically aloof, and Elder was realistically experiencing an extreme case of insta-lust. I was fine with that on both sides.

Verdict: While the characterization was a little flat and the plot was hopelessly predictable, I liked Across the Universe. It was fast-paced and engaging, Revis writes well, and the aftertaste of the story itself is good. I will most certainly be reading the sequel.