In a sea of vampires and wizards, sometimes it’s hard to find the “science fiction” in the genre of YA (young adult) fantasy and science fiction. But for someone whose first real love affair with a book came in the form of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, I have a soft spot in YA for worlds beyond with a tech instead of magic flair. So no matter how old you are, if you like scifi, especially the kind that involves giant spaceships, then I highly recommend Across the Universe. From the book jacket:

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awake 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 a brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Across the Universe is the first novel of Beth Revis, who gives hope to frustrated writers everywhere by admitting that she wrote 10 failed manuscripts of other books before landing on one that worked (and getting an agent with a cold query besides). Her bio also says she’s a big fan of Doctor Who and Firefly, which is always a plus – and the book contains what seems to be a big Firefly shout-out that I doubt is coincidental.

We don’t have a lot of book reviews here on [GAS] largely because publishers aren’t beating down the door with ARCs, so if I manage to purchase a newly-minted book on my own, read it quickly enough so a review is still relevant, and then bother to write one, you can rest assured that it’s worth reading. I’d suggest Across the Universe to anyone fond of dystopias in particular – to me, it held shades of The Giver, which was another favorite of mine, the precursor to me of reading The Handmaid’s Tale and Brave New World. It has the characters and bit of romance to suck in teenage readers, but the overall story should appeal across the board to science fiction fans.

[Across the Universe @ Amazon.com]