But there are things that aren’t right: the timing seems off, and calculations reveal that the ship should have landed at Centauri-Earth long ago. The ship’s population has been kept under control by Phydus, a drug that is pumped into their water supply, ever since a horrible plague wiped out much of the population and the Elder system was established. He is faced with a daunting set of challenges: somebody has been murdering the people in cryo-sleep. We meet Elder, a teenage boy near Amy’s age who has been bred to become the next leader of the ship. She chooses to take the journey, but then is awakened from cryo-sleep 50 years too early, to find a society on the ship very different from what she expected. Amy’s parents are involved in the mission and she is given a choice between living out her life on Earth without them, or giving up everything she knows to go to an unknown planet. For the rest of you, this review will contain spoilers for the first two books, and a few for the third book but I’ll try to keep those to a minimum.įirst, a quick synopsis of the first two books: the Godspeed is headed to a promising Earth-like planet 300 years away. Instead, go back and read my mostly spoiler-free review of those.

Now, for those of you who haven’t read the first two books yet, you may want to stop here. It’s a great conclusion to the story, and even if you’re not a big fan of the romance portion (which seems to be a requisite for young adult fiction), the sci-fi part of the story is worth checking out. The final book in the trilogy, Shades of Earth, is out this week (Tuesday, January 15), and I got an early peek at it. I mentioned Beth Revis’ Across the Universe trilogy as one of my favorite books of 2012, though I only reviewed the first two so far.

Shades of earth beth revis