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Last time she was down here, wickedtrue lent me Beth Revis' Across the Universe with strict instructions to tell the internet all about it.

The best and most powerful thing about Across the Universe is the situation that protagonist Amy finds herself in: she's decided to sign up for a three-hundred-and-fifty year cryosleep journey to a new habitable planet to accompany her parents, despite extreme personal misgivings about the idea, and then gets accidentally woken up fifty years too early. Which leaves her stuck on a spaceship that she never wanted to be on, with absolutely nothing that is familiar to her, and faced with the decision of either waking her parents, with the knowledge that by doing so she will be both taking key personnel away from the landing mission and ruining their own actual dreams of seeing a new planet, or SPENDING THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS TRAPPED AND ALONE.

Maybe it's just me, but I find this whole setup viscerally terrifying. The concept of knowing that I would have to wait fifty years to see the people I love, if I even survive that long . . . . in a way, that's worse than not being able to see them again at all. The fact that in the centuries since takeoff the ship's generation crew have evolved into a creepy mind-control totalitarian society is pretty much just icing on a terrible, terrible cake. The fact that someone appears to be trying to kill off some of the other frozen passengers is . . . the piping or fondant or something on the icing on the cake of terrible, and I think my metaphor has gotten away from me. Anyway, someone is killing off the frozens, and this also sucks, but at least playing detective gives Amy cool ways to be proactive and something to do that is not GIVING INTO ENTIRELY UNDERSTANDABLE DESPAIR.

The book alternates POV chapters between Amy and Elder, the Designated Next Totalitarian Leader who is currently going through a teen rebellious phase, making him ripe to be convinced by Amy that Totalitarianism Is Bad and Society Must Be Reconfigured! This message, for the record, is . . . not subtle, although I have hopes that future books will complicate it somewhat. My favorite is the conversation that goes like this:

AMY: [Your leader] Eldest sounds like a regular Hitler to me.
ELDER: Eldest has always taught me that Hitler was a wise, cultured leader for his people . . .

(I am pretty sure this is the sound of the narrative Reductio ad Hitleruming itself.)

I also find it pretty problematic that Amy is white (and beautiful and redheaded!) and all the people on the ship are monoethnic and vaguely of color; I can see why this seemed like a good idea to Revis (everyone in the totalitarian society needs to look uniform, and what better way to go about it than to find the middle ground in an initially racially diverse crew?) but when the white girl magically reappears to teach the brown people all about freedom and democracy, this is starting to veer perilously close to What These People Need is a Honky territory. Other characters do have agency, but still. (And it would have been so easy to fix this, is the thing. Amy doesn't have to be white to look dramatically different in a monoethnic society.) I also - hmm, well, if anyone else has read this, I would be interested to hear what you thought about what the book does with mental illness.

So that is your fair warning about the things that bothered me. The good points are, as I have said, the sheer creepiness of the setup, and she makes you feel it; Beth Revis does a pretty amazing job of writing claustrophobically. Also, it's absolutely a page-turner - occasional anvils to the head aside, the story was compelling enough that I generally didn't want to put the book down. (And although I could see some plot twists coming a mile away, there were others that genuinely surprised me.) Apparently this is the first in a trilogy, and I'm also awfully curious where she's going to go from the place she ends the first book - it could be really interesting, or it could be really frustrating. We will see!