Crewel Intentions

One of my favorite things about e-books is the sheer variety one can now find, of course one of my least favorite things about e-books is the sheer variety of crapiness one can also find.  The upside is that most major online retailers (notably Barnes and Noble and Amazon) have a daily deal or even several deals where you can buy books that normally cost upwards of $18 for a mere couple of bucks.  Most of the books in these categories are from lesser known authors, or titles you may not have heard of before.  I have purchased many of these because hey for a couple bucks it is totally worth the risk.  I have found a few amazing books this way, and found new authors to love that I would never have the opportunity to find before this.  I have also found some really horrible books, crappy editing, amateur writing, books drug out into series that should have stayed as one book. And then there are the inbetweeners, books that have great potential but suffer from various issues.  Crewel by Gennifer Albin was one of these inbetween books.  I really wanted to like it.  It had an interesting premise and potential to go in many different directions, but in the end it just did not work for me.  Lets get to it shall we?

As always Spoiler Ahead!

We meet the main character Adelice Lewys, a teenage girl who lives on the world Arras.  This world is a highly controlled place, where women are subject to men and everything from food to jobs to education to the number of children your allowed to have is regulated by the all powerful Guild.  We learn that Adelice has just come from a mandatory testing to become a Spinster, a female who can see the "fabric" of the world and manipulate it.  To become a Spinster is every girls dream, it allows them to live in the lap of luxury and they are treated like celebrities.  For some reason though Adelice's parents are dead set against her becoming a Spinster.  Even though she displays immense talent at a young age, her parents teach her to hide it, to act clumsy and graceless. Unfortunately on the day of testing Adelice slips and weaves on the Loom that has been set up for testing purposes.  Her younger sister Amie, who is the most important person in Adelice's life is completely

oblivious to the tension surrounding the testing.  Adelice lies to her parents about her slip, trying to have one last night with her family before they take her away.  When they come for her, Adelice's parents do something unusual, they drag the girls to the basement and try to escape out of tunnels that had been built just for this purpose.  It is to no avail Adelice is captured, her father killed and her sister and mother's whereabouts are unknown. Cormac Patton, the Ambassador between the all powerful Guild and the Coventry (which is where the Spinsters live) warns Adelice to cooperate or bad things will happen. Adelice is taken to the Coventry where she is placed in a cell with nothing but a stone cold floor for company.  She meets Jost, the head valet who brings her food and has a bit of a sarcastic streak.  She is finally brought to her new rooms, which are palatial and belong only to her.  She is given a make over and a wardrobe and more food then she has ever seen in her life.  She is also given a mentor, a kind hearted Spinster by the name of Enora.  Enora gets her situated, but cannot or will not answer most of Adelice's questions, she is taken to orientation and meets her fellow trainee's for the first time.  It is here we learn not every girl selected actually ends up a Spinster, much testing is done and only a very few end up actually able to weave at a level needed to become a Spinster.  Everybody else is given other jobs in the Coventry, but none may leave. A bunch of stuff happens...kind of...ish.  Adelice makes enemies of pretty much every one, because she can't keep her mouth shut.  She meets Erik and a bit of a love triangle forms between her, Erik and Jost...kind of.  She learns the "shocking" (yes that is in quotes because, seriously not shocking at all) truth about her world from the Creweler Loricel.  Apparently only the most super duper talented girls can become the Creweler, a Creweler can see the weave of the world and manipulate it without a loom.  A Creweler is the only person who can harvest raw materials and weave more actual substance into the world of Arras.  All the other Spinsters can do is manipulate the material that is already present.   The "shocking truth" of Arras is that it is built over, or around, or on top of, or through or something (this part doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me) Earth.  Apparently humans were busy planning to bomb each other to end a war (it sounds like it may have been WWII from some of what they were saying, but I haven't been able to confirm it yet), but one of

the creators of the bomb posed some sort of space/time theory and the result was 12 nations of Earth decided to "weave" themselves a new home. Every body who knows about Earth assumes that the people left there have utterly destroyed themselves and the world with it.  Resources are pretty limited and everybody lives in utter and total fear of any type of discord, so the Guild has taken over for every body's own good.  From what I read, it sounds like the world of Arras has only been around for a couple of generations, but again not a lot of actual facts or consistency.  Adelice is continually being dragged back and forth between being wooed and coddled for her talents and threatened and tortured for her uppity behavior.  On top of all this Adelice discovers multiple conspiracies...kind of.  There is a process called ripping, which essentially means a Spinster can pull a persons thread and they disappear to who knows where.  The sick part is a person can put in a request to have an elderly or sick relative ripped without their consent.  What happens to a persons thread after they are ripped is never really talked about (probably because there are two more books), but a Big Bad Conspiracy is hinted at. More stuff happens...kind of.  Adelice finally has had enough and realizes she can use her super duper weaving power to rip a big whole in reality itself.  She takes herself, Jost and Erik through the rip and ends up on Earth.  The book ends just as a zeppelin type things comes over the horizon.

Other stuff happened in the book, there were lots of characters and lots of ideas and lots of conspiracies and lots of mysteries...kind of.  Are you getting sick of my kind of's yet?  Yeah me too.  I think that this was my biggest problem with the story, there was a lot going on, but none of it seemed to be going anywhere.  It felt like the author had a lot of great ideas, but did not know how to fully integrate them into one functioning story.  She missed a lot of opportunities to give us information to help us acclimate to this world we knew nothing about.  Every once in a while she would throw out a custom, or a geographical type reference, but for the most part I was left feeling like I did not know enough about this world to care what happened to it or its people. To me the key to a story like this is to really build a world that you want to know more about, and this book seemed like it wanted to, but it never was fully formed for me.  The idea/theory that Arras is based on, that it is a world literally woven out of space, time and stuff is a cool one and I would have loved to

explore the idea fully, but again the author left if until about 2/3 of the way through the book to even attempt to explain why they even needed Spinsters (which is the sole focus of the book), and then it felt like it was supposed to be this huge twisty reveal...which it wasn't.  I think it would have been better for the reader if the author had just shown us how the world worked pretty quickly, then you might have been able to enjoy the story instead of constantly wondering what the heck was going on!  The main character Adelice drove me banana's.  She seemed to come across as a feisty truth seeker, which is awesome.  She was loyal to her family and always had her sisters best interest at heart, she even risked her own little bit of happiness to reveal some potentially life changing information to Jost, all admirable and wonderful traits.  Except for all her mouthing off, she came across as completely powerless.  From the early parts of the book, she is aware of her super duper weaving ability, by half way through the book she knows she can pretty much do whatever she wants with the weave of the world AND she knows that you can rip a persons thread out of the weave...so what does she do with all this as they are torturing her, her loved ones, and friends? NOTHING! That's right, all it would take is for her to reach out and tug on a persons life thread as a reminder that she does not even need any special tools

to use the weave, she can rip you or your loved ones any time she wants if you don't do what she wants, but no, she whimpers and sneaks around and freaks when they decide to do mind experiments to get her to behave.  I wanted to shake her and shout "FOR THE LOVE OF LITTLE GREEN APPLES YOU CONTROL THE WHOLE FREAKING WEAVE!!!!!!" Anyways, a bit on the frustrating side.  I wanted to know more about this world and how it worked, I wanted to know how it was the Guild came to be and how they keep such tight control, I wanted to know if women were the ONLY ONES who could keep this world from fading away, why did they allow themselves to be second class citizens?  I wanted to know what all these supposed awesome clothes looked like (other then jewel colored), I wanted this book to be what it could have been.  I give it 4 out of 10 woven tapestries
What book(s) frustrate you with unrealized potential?  Did you think this book was going somewhere or did it get to caught up in its own ideas?  Am I being unrealistic in my demand for perfection? Do you ever feel bad not liking a book?