Book in a Series - Across the Universe

Don't you hate it when you are reading a book and it's part of a book series and you have to wait FOREVER for the next book to come out.  Then you get the next book and you can't remember where it left off?  Well I'm going to summarize a book in a series that I've read so that when I get the next book I can look at my summary and know what happened.  Warning, the following contains spoilers!

 Across the Universe Series
Across the Universe - Beth Revis

A Million Suns - 01/12/12

We meet  Amy, she is being frozen along with her parents to travel in a ship named Godspeed.  In the ship they are sending the best scientist and some military to New Earth.  The journey is supposed to take 300 years.  Once she is frozen she realizes that her body is in suspended animation while her mind is wide awake.  She is woken up 50 years before she is supposed to.  She befriends the only other person her age, a boy named Elder.  She wakes up on Godspeed and life is very different from life on Earth.  No one knows about the stars and Earth is viewed as something bad.  She is also not the only one that has been woken up early, but she is the only one that has survived.  The boy Elder is the future leader and butts heads with the current leader, Eldest.  Something happened some years back, a disease of some sort that wiped out a big population and from that time forward there has been a leader.  The job of the leader is to make sure all the people do what their job is required of them.  All the people have a job and are good at it and follow it.  Almost mindlessly and we later find out is due to a drug that is given to them.


Eldest just wants to get rid of Amy but Elder says she should stay.  He gets to know her and learns what life was really like on Earth and how wrong life is on Godspeed.  People should not be treated like cattle.  There are so many plot twists.  Eventually we find out the doctor put certain genes in people before they are born to make them good at certain things.  The water everyone drinks is spiked with a drug that makes them mindless and complacent.  Also Elder is the clone of Eldest who is the clone of the previous leader and so on.  Since the disease that killed off the population and a person took up the post of leader, that person has been cloned over and over again.  They oversee the population younger than them.  So the leader is the only one in their generation.  Also the doctor kills all the old people and makes it seem like they are dying naturally.  The generations are created by having a mating season where people just go at it wherever they are (Amy witnesses some of this). 

The person responsible for killing all those frozen is someone named Orion, who was a previous leader that was believed to be dead.  Although we find out that Amy was not woken up by Orion but rather Elder, who was so fascinated by her appearance and also she was the same age as him and he was lonely.

At the end, Eldest & Orion die, making Elder the new leader.  He decides to stop giving people the drug and have them think for themselves.  Amy is angry at Elder for waking her up but feeling have developed between Amy & Elder.