Title: Crewel
Author: Gennifer Albin
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Rating: worthy!
This is evidently yet another trilogy (yeah, and we all know what happened to Stephen King's Dark Tower "Trilogy" don't we?!), and this is novel #1 in that series. At first blush this novel felt like a mash-up of the beginning of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, together with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, with some serious borrowing from Alma Alexander's World Weavers series, and a good dollop of George Orwell's 1984!
There's a prologue which I naturally skipped. Chapter one is rather confusing and very whinily told in the first person, which was a major turn-off. I'm increasingly growing to detest the first person PoV in these YA stories and it may well influence which ones I read and which I pass over in future!
This is another novel which features abysmal names for the characters, such as Cormac and Adelice. Adelice is the female protagonist and Cormac is a textbook villain, although to be fair, he does become rather more nuanced as the story progresses. My position is that if you're going to write a story about a strong female, then please don’t libel her by giving her a name that sounds like some sort of confectionery, unless you’re going to make her a majorly bad-ass woman. Whether that's what Adelice becomes remains to be seen.
The yummy-sounding Adelice is a 16-year-old who is a prime candidate to be chosen as a spinster. A spinster is far from what you might think, although it ends up being precisely the same as you might think! In this case, the spinsters all start out as young girls who are removed forcibly from their families (this is the part which reminded me, for some reason, of The Hunger Games!). They are kept confined to a life of quite literally spinning and maintaining reality on a loom, something apparently only people with two X chromosomes can do, although why this hi-tech society cannot discover what it is in these peoples' genes which lend them a proclivity for this, will I predict, remain a complete mystery. The bizarre twist to this is that this is in a world where women are religiously relegated to a second-rate (hell, try fourth rate), and highly disrespected status (even more so than they actually are in the real world). That's a huge disconnect for me, as indeed was the whole of the first chapter.
The name of the nation is Arras (which sounds suspiciously like 'her ass', or maybe 'harass', but which is merely another name for 'tapestry'!). There's no indication in the early chapters as to whether this is supposed to be on Earth in some other time-period, or if this is somewhere else completely, but many of the place names sound suspiciously close to those borne by Earth locales.
Adelice is at home with her younger sister Amie, and her mother and father. She's aware that she will be taken to be a spinster (there's a testing), but she lies to her family about it; however, her family seems to be as equally aware as she is, and when the jackbooted thugs abruptly arrive to take her that evening to fulfill the honorable role for which she has been chosen, her entire family inexplicably (and very confusingly) scatters into the basement, diving into four escape tunnels. They're all captured except for her mother. Her father is summarily killed as a traitor, her sister taken prisoner, and Adelice is drugged and hauled off to be literally made-over as a spinster.
Her captor, Cormac takes her to the 'rebound station' (that's pretty funny given that the ebook I'm reading in alternation with this is Love Rehab lol!) where she's confined by means of tight straps and a restrictive helmet in a capsule and somehow translated from point A to point B (by the spinsters). At point B, she's left in a cold dark cell overnight in punishment for her treasonous behavior. She sheds not a tear for her dead father or for her scattered family. The next morning she's removed roughly from her cell by a dirty, disrespectful, disheveled and demeaning boy who, I'm guessing, is the instalove bad boy in an upcoming triangle. She has no problem finding him hot and checking him out despite what's happened to her and notwithstanding his behavior! Yeah, right, because young women are horny all the time just like the porn videos say they are!
This removal is overseen by a pretty boy who is, I'm assuming, the other guy in this sad, sad, sad, attempt at a YA love triangle. I already feel nauseous, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. Maybe. Maybe I'm making one of my famously adrift prognostications here. We'll see. Adelice is taken upstairs and left with two beautiful women for a makeover (into what is, ostensibly, a geisha girl!) so she can start her career as a spinster, presumably.
Since I've not yet physically vomited at this point, I'm still reading this in the desperate hope against hope that it will improve at least a bit. I am trying to be optimistic and indulging myself liberally in the wild fantasy that the back-cover blurb didn't lie, I promise.
So at about 50% into this, I I have to confess that I've improved my opinion significantly! I no longer live in fear of vomitus maximus! On the contrary, I've become quite engrossed in the story (even as it continues to be rather weird), although I still can’t promise at this point that I'll want to continue the series after volume one! I think with this series, you have to suspend your disbelief a bit higher than usual, at least for the first fifty or so pages, and if you can do that, you're rewarded quite well. See? I learn new things about myself every day! Lol!
After her make-over, Adelice joins other potential spinsters for the first time. At that time they're being tested further, because not everyone who is abducted from their home ends up as a spinster. They also serve who only make the wait-staff.... There's still no word on why only women can do this and why they have to be pure (shades of Rampant!). It’s a bit genderist, not only that men are excluded, but that the entire premise of the novel relegates woman to a yesteryear where all they were allowed to do was domestic duties, including spinning yarn while their men were spinning yarns. There's still no word, either, on where this world is.
The "retreat" where the spinsters are confined (there are four of these, one in each quadrant of Arras) is referred to as a "coventry", which sounds a bit like convent, but it reminds me of the city of the same name in England, and in particular, of the phrase, associated with that city, of being sent to Coventry, which is pretty much what happened to these girls.
Adelice starts learning a little about the place as she is shown around with the other girls, and even begins bonding with one of them called Pryana, who seems to be nothing more than a trope antagonist of Adelice's own age. She moves from friend to fiend rather too easily (although, arguably, with good reason) when Maela (doesn't that sound disturbingly close to 'male'? More genderism?), the evil witch queen in charge of the new spinsters' training, invites the girls to each take a shot at working with the weave of the real world (WorldWeavers, anyone?! Alexander did have her idea five years before Albin), and they do so with more or less competence until the only two girls left are Adelice, who is at the time, desperate to keep her superlative weaving skills under a bushel (or bustle?!), and Pryana, who is simply nervous.
Maela shows them a loom which contains a real-world fabric of far more complexity than the other girls have had access to, and Adelice steps up to give Pryana a break from her nerves, which is what Maela was evidently hoping for. She tells Adelice that there is a weak thread in the weave, and she must find it and cut it out. Adelice finds it very competently; then comes the argument. Adelice argues that it’s not that weak and it will do more harm to remove it than to leave it be. Maela reacts angrily to this defiance and instead of removing the one thread, removes the entire patch of fabric around it.
In the real world, this entire patch was the academy at which Pryana's younger sister was in attendance, which has now ceased to exist. In short, Adelice's arguing with Maela has resulted in Pryana's sister dying, just like her inability to accept her role as a spinster resulted in her father's death. That's why Pryana now hates Adelice to the point where she actually punches her shortly afterwards. Pryana incurs no more cost for this punch than did Maela for destroying an academy, which is to say: none. That jarred! Adelice, OTOH, is once again confined to a cell! Let's add a liberal amount of Cinderella to this mash-up, shall we?
When Adelice gets out of the cell, she's notified that Cormac has chosen her to be his escort on a whistle-stop tour of the quadrants into which Arras is divided. For this she requires yet another make-over and a new wardrobe, of course. She travels on the rebound system, and at one stop she encounters her young sister. Amie has herself been made over, but in her case, mentally: she no longer recalls her old life or her sister and thinks her mother is someone who Adelice has never even seen before. Adelice discovers this when she foolishly confronts her sister, but, curiously, she garners for herself no punishment for this, and now she knows where her sister is.
At that same stop, Adelice encounters Loricel, the one and only 'Crewel' in the entire world and as such, the most powerful woman in this patriarchal society. In reality, crewel refers a type of yarn or a type of embroidery, but in Albin's world, it means a person who is both skilled enough (and permitted to) add things to the world as well as to remove them. On Adelice's return, Loricel calls her for a meeting and Adelice learns she is to be trained as a crewel, meaning that her status in the coventry is now on par with Maela's. The reason for this is Adelice's outstanding (unique in fact) ability to not only see the weave of the world without using a loom, but to put her hands into it and change it. Loricel is of course aware of this, which is why Adelice has turned up at this particular coventry.
Loricel shows Adelice a fabric from which the latter is told to remove a thread - meaning that an old woman will die. Adelice does this without hesitation. There's been quite a change in her attitude, it seems! Then Loricel shows Adelice how she adds to the world by placing a lake in a grassy valley, which is achieved by adding blue thread and tying it into the weave with a surrounding thread. When Adelice looks at the fabric on zoom, she can see the beautiful lake as it is out there in her world.
This is where my SoD (suspension of disbelief) takes a hit right in the grass, because I don’t see how this world makes sense if you examine it too closely. If these people can make things magically appear and disappear, why does anyone have any problems? Why does anyone work? Why is anyone deprived and hungry? This is another similarity with The Hunger Games, except we know in that case that the capital let the districts suffer pretty much out of spite. There has been no such 'justification' offered here. Worse than this, these spinsters could remove all of the cruel males from the entire world. Why don’t they? Will we find out?
Well this thing picked up and dropped off and then picked up again, so I'm going to give this a worthy because it turns out that I actually care about what happens when Adelice takes both Josten and Erik out of Arras (or out on their ass). So I won't post any more spoilers. Let's just say it gets frantic and interesting, and I still don't like this love traingale, but to give her her due, Albin definitely has no shame about how far she'll take it, does she?!
