Across the Universe - Beth Revis

Title: Across the Universe
Author: Beth Revis
Genre: Sci-Fi
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: Audiobook ~10hrs
Date read: September, 2012

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.

I had expected an average book - run-of-the-mill YA sci-fi and was very pleasantly surprised by how the book progressed. I 'read' it as an audiobook read by two different people taking "Amy's" and "Ender's" chapters respectively. This worked really well and gave a dynamic to the book that I think would have been hard to capture had there been only the one reader.

The story itself is disturbing. I'd guessed many of the twists ahead of time, but that didn't bother me as they weren't blatantly obvious - I've just read enough of this type books to be able to make educated guesses ;) Giving any of the plot away would be a shame, so I'll just leave it at that it is an altogether fascinating book, and I wonder how Beth Revis could possibly expand on it in her sequel.

Drengen i kufferten - Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis

Title: Drengen i kufferten (The Boy in the Suitcase)
Author: Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis
Genre: Suspense
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 319
Date read: September, 2012

Nina Borg works with refugees in Denmark - both those above and under ground - and she's used to emergencies. She lives a large part of her life in a world that other Danes seldom see, even though it's right next to us all the time. It is a world where blackmail, trafficking, abuse and unnecessary death is part of every-day life; a world where children disappear every day without anybody asking any questions.

But Nina cannot close her eyes to people's plight. When she finds the boy in the black suitcase, she tries to discover who he is, and where he came from. She won't let him be part of the statistic of children who just disappear.

That turns out to be a life-threatening decision.

I wavered between 2 and 3 stars for a long time. It has taken me forever to get through this book, and I contemplated giving up on it several times, but while I had no particular desire to pick it up for long stretches of time, when I actually did pick it up, I was intrigued by what I read. I think in the end I read this in 3 or 4 sittings... but with a couple of weeks between each.

The plot is thrilling and supposed to keep you at the edge of your seat... which it also manages to do most of the time. But every now and again the main character just makes a decision so mindnumblingly stupid that I felt like throwing the book aside in disgust. If you find a person brutally murdered, call the police! Don't just walk around the house, leaving blood and fingerprints all over the place and then run away, dropping your mobile phone in the process - that's just plain stupid!

Fortunately the second half was a lot better than the first - both in terms of plot and in the lack of stupid decisions made, so at the end of the day I enjoyed it more than I had at one point thought I would, and I'm glad I stuck it out. So 3 stars it is - as well as a determination not to read any more books in this series. While well written, they're just too unpleasant.