The buzz for this book was astronomical. It was all over twitter and facebook and the vast majority of book blogs. Or at least the ones I visit. There was all this potential swag to be won, a super cool contest on the author’s blog just before Christmas and secret project to have book blogs across the web participate in a launch party.
All of this hype worried me. I wasn’t sure if any debut, or beginning of a series, was worth me getting as excited as I was. But, excited I got, and when I finally got my hands on a copy of the book, I pretty much just sat down and read until I was done.
The first thing this book has is secrets. It’s riddled with them. In the first chapter we see seventeen year old Amy and her parents are being cryogenically frozen in preporation for a three hunred year journet across the universe. But we aren’t told why. There’s hints about dirty politics, something to do with the military. And then one of the people freezing Amy and family lets slip that there’s been a delay in the ship launch. The people they are freezing now are jst going to sit around on earth for a year, when they could have been living their lives, seeing their loved ones, and they aren’t even told why.
Fast forward two hundred and fifty years and we meet a young man named Elder. He is next in line to rule the people aboard the ship Godspeed. But there’s mystery here to. Elder hasn’t been told things about the ship, or it’s history. He is scheduled to take over the rule of it but has been kept in the dark about what that means, or what the ship’s purpose even is. And as the cryogenically frozen people, the ship’s important cargo, start being murdered in their sleep, Elder is faced with a choice. Stand up to his mentor, and the ship’s ruler, or carry on as he always has, trusting everything he says.
Elder was such a surprise for me in this book. Everything that I’d heard beforehand had been about Amy. Sure, you could tell from the cover that there were two people involved in the book but I didn’t know anything about him. And he was the best part of the book.
As Amy is still frozen for the a good chunk of the beginning, we see the beginnings of the story, and the mystery of life aboard the goodship Godspeed through Elder’s eyes and it is a fascinating world. Simultaneausly, giant and tiny. A ship big enough to hold a city and a field and have secret levels. It boggles the mind. But then, from anywhere you stand on the ship you can see the walls.
Once Amy does wake up she is terribly clausterphobic despite never having been before.
What I really loved about this book was even though the culprit for the murders was rather obvious, the reasoning behind them, and the reasoning of why life on the ship is lived the way it is, was a complete mystery. And even once that was revealed there was another reveal, another HUGE reveal at the end. There is mystery within mystery in this world and we still don’t know all the answers.
Why was the ship launched in the first place? Why was it delayed a year?
I’m still not even sure we saw all the area’s of the ship. I kept hoping for there to be some sort of escape shuttle. But one was not revealed to us in this book. *crosses fingers for the next one*
When all was said and done at the end of the book, I still wasn’t quite sure who had the right idea and who was the biggest jerk. What I did know was that having thousands of people living aboard a ship, even if it seems like a giant ship, is bad idea. Things go wrong.
But it makes a good book. And I can’t wait for the second one.