Across the Universe by Beth Revis, Penguin, RRP $26, ISBN 9780141333663, Available Now.

Across the Universe has been a bit of a shooting star across the sci-fi/teen/YA fiction universe, but not without its controversy. I don’t think I’ll touch on that here – it’s pretty much been covered from both sides.

This is a “pick it up and don’t put it down until you’ve finished” book.  Across the Universe is, have no doubt, a fantastic read. It starts off incredibly strong with a first chapter that not only sets up a major part of the plot but also manages to be gripping, thrilling and slightly icky. Always a good combination.

It doesn’t quite manage to sustain this pace throughout the story but Revis takes a damn good crack at it. There is a freshness and feeling of originality about this book (apart from very vague shades of Wall-E) – humans are blasting off into space from earth in an effort to find liveable planets to colonise. They think they’ve found one – so Amy and her family (and hundreds of others) are frozen in time to make the 200 year journey to the new planet.

Except Amy gets woken up early. About 50 years too early. And soon other frozen people are being woken up only they aren’t surviving the reanimation process.

Meantime, while they’ve been travelling, a whole society has been created in the ship that is a weird simulcrum of human culture on earth. This society is led by Eldest – and his next in line is Elder – a boy Amy’s age who, whilst being romantically attracted to Amy, is also grappling with his impending responsibilities.

How could this not be a fantastic story? People are frozen! Cows are being farmed! Inside a space ship! Only, apparently they don’t look like actual cows, which of course we only find out once Amy has seen them through earth eyes.

Through Elder’s voice and story it becomes clear that this is a story about ambivalences, underneath its sci-fi/thriller exterior. About how we only know history through the history we’ve been taught – and that may not be as objective as we naturally think it is. About how doing the “right thing” isn’t always obvious. The personal isn’t the political. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Etc.

Some parts of the story do have a slightly odd tone. A strong sexual aspect to the new society is introduced about two-thirds of the way in that to be honest felt quite misplaced to me. The new society is very strictly generational – and the young generation (slightly older than Amy and Elder) are about to enter the Season. If you have even a passing familiarity with animal husbandry it probably won’t take you long to figure out what that means. The Season causes them to become uninhibitedly sexual and to engage in (presumably, though it’s not exactly graphically described) sexual acts in public.

In and of itself this plot line is actually quite important and it has serious implications for Elder. But it’s Amy’s strong negative reaction to this that just plain felt weird, and to then eventually make her *spoiler alert*

To be honest this aspect of the story is just odd. There’s a strangely strong puritanical ethic going on here. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to takeaway from this plot point as a reader (and moreover if I was the target teenage reader) – sex is gross and dangerous?

Fortunately though, this isn’t a book about Amy (though the publicity would have us think differently), this is a book about Elder. And it’s a far better book for that.

What I liked most about Across the Universe is that while its plot was basically quite simple (the whodunnit aspect and the *gasp* revelation aspect started to get fairly obvious well before the big reveals), the underpinning ideas weren’t.

This is the first of a trilogy (apparently) and I will be reading the other two. With such an intriguing start, how could I not?