Across the Universe

Note that this review may contain spoilers.

This book was an impulse buy (a lot of my books are). When I happened to come across it at Wal-Mart, I had never heard of it. But I was in a book-buying mood and it sounded interesting...

Exposition: This book is from two different points of view: Amy's and Elder's. In the beginning, we're really just learning a little bit about each of them. There is one difference however. With Elder, we're learning about his day to day life (on a spaceship 250 years into the future). With Amy, the life she knows is about to end. She is being frozen (so she can travel on said spaceship and survive until they land).

Rising Action: The main conflict in this story is the fact that someone is unplugging the 'frozens'. This signifies that the rising action should revolved around the characters finding out who this person is, right? And as they find out, so should I, right? Wrong. I knew who it was as soon as they were mentioned on page 25: I know perfectly well there had been another Elder, one between me and Eldest. He died before I was born, but Eldest never talked much about him before. It did take me a while to figure out that the other Elder and Orion were the same person but I still figured it out way before the climax.

There were actually many aspects of this book that were predictable. I just knew that Luthe was going to attack Amy and I had a feeling that Harley was going to go through the hatch and launch himself into space. This didn't make it a bad story (but then I'm one of those people who you can tell the end of a movie to and I'll still watch it just to see how it got to that), it was told wonderfully and I loved connecting all the clues in my head.

Climax: A thousand things seemed to happen in these few pages. Amy takes out the wires to the water pump (the one that distributed Phydus to the whole ship), Elder learns he is a clone, Eldest dies, Orion reveals himself, Orion gets frozen. But the one thing that really made me perk up was the small bit of foreshadowing. And that's when I knew. I knew why Amy didn't fit in with the other unplugged frozens. I knew that Orion hadn't meant to unplug her dad. I knew that Elder had unplugged her. He confirms my thoughts soon.

Falling Action/Resolution: When Elder tells Amy what he did, at first she is angry. But then she realizes that Elder is the only one who hasn't deceived her is some way. In the end, with her words ("Will you stay with me?") I would like to believe that she forgave him.