First-Impression Friday: Across the Universe

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.

Title: The title Across the Universe certainly isn’t bad. It immediately gives you the idea that this story is Sci-fi and probably takes place on a spaceship. While I think it’s not really that interesting, it gives a great feel for the story.

Cover: So many people have said they absolutely loved the cover, but it wasn’t until I actually got the book in my hands that I saw why. I never understood why it had the random squiggly pink stuff… then when I actually go the book I saw that it’s the black part that’s important. I’m so blind… Anyways, I think this cover is really original and inventive, as well as fitting the book perfectly.

Pitch: First off, I’ve always loved the idea of freezing people to make a long universe-crossing adventure. Then having the main character wake up fifty years early was genius, especially since her parents are still ‘sleeping,’ so whenever they wake up she’ll be older than them. And the idea that it wasn’t just an accident that she woke up, that someone tried to murder her… This is an excellent premise.

First Sentence: Daddy said, “Let Mom go first.”

This isn’t bad, but I’m not sure it’s as strong as it could be. It gives me a question, ‘Go first in what? Why does he want Mom to go first?’ but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with them travelling across the universe. It does nicely start in the middle of things, though.

First Chapter: This was one great first chapter. Amy and her parents are getting frozen, so Beth Revis describes the process in detail. Her writing is so descriptive that I was squirming through the whole chapter. So early on in the book Amy’s given a terrible choice, which lets us know so much about her as a person. We’re also given a tantalizing tidbit that should hopefully become a major plot point in the story.

Overall: I can’t think of anything I really don’t like about the packaging of this story. Maybe the title could ‘pop’ just a little more, but aside from that everything’s great.