Author: Beth Revis
First Published: January 2013
Publisher: Razorbill
Series: Across the Universe #3
369 pages (hardcover)
The final book of the Across The Universe YA trilogy! In case you haven’t read my reviews of the previous two books, I am a big fan of this series and really enjoyed books one and two. Needless to say, I greatly anticipated book three, Shades Of Earth, especially since book two ended on such a cliffhanger! Because I found books one and two to be absolutely fantastic, I did have rather high expectations for book three and I’m happy to find that it completely lived up to my expectations! (Sadly, I think the cover is really atrocious and doesn’t link itself to the first two books at all).
The first two books in this series are about a young teenage girl, Amy, who was cryogenically frozen aboard the enormous spacecraft, Godspeed, along with many other humans, to become colonizers of a newly discovered Earth-like planet dubbed Centauri-Earth. It is a 300 year journey, but Amy is accidentally unfrozen 50 years too soon by a boy named Elder. Elder is the leader-in-training of the shipborn humans, the ones who were born, lived, and died, on Godspeed all their lives in order to keep the ship operating for so long. Not to get into too much detail, but Amy and Elder discover a huge conspiracy/secret about the ship which takes up the first two books in the trilogy.
In book three, we have finally landed on Centauri-Earth! I have looked forward to this moment for a long time, ever since the very first book. I wondered if the new planet is going to as wonderful as the characters believed it could be, despite the unknown dangers they are also aware of. Seriously, I really, really looked forward to it! The book did a really good job dragging out my curiosity for as long as possible. Maybe some people will see that as a bad thing, but I loved it — I hung onto every word that I read, and kept telling myself ‘one more chapter, one more chapter’. Every chapter seemed to add more and more questions to my list, and I was just dying to know what this new planet was all about. This was the kind of book where once I started reading, I couldn’t stop.
(The following paragraph contains spoilers!) One thing I wasn’t completely satisfied with was the new character of Chris and his role in the story. It didn’t really make sense to me why, when the Godspeed survivors landed, the Colonel (Amy’s dad) would let Chris into their colony and pretend to everyone that he was actually a part of the group the whole time. That just seemed farfetched and ridiculous to me. I don’t know about you, but if I was starting a colony on a new planet and ran across a strange human being who was not a part of my group, I wouldn’t invite him to simply pretend he was with us all along and not tell anyone. Wouldn’t you want to get more information from him? Anyway, that one part seemed off to me, but not enough to seriously distract me from the story. (End spoilers!)
I think it’s just crazy (in a good way) how Beth Revis keeps coming up with secret after secret for Amy and Elder to discover. The entire series has been such a roller-coaster ride. I enjoyed the direction Shades Of Earth headed towards in this book and I liked the happy ending as well. I don’t really have much else to say about this book because I enjoyed reading it so much — stayed up super late to finish it! — and found very little to complain about. I really, really recommend this YA series, hope you will like it too!
My Rating: 5/5
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