Altered (Crewel World, #2)

by Gennifer Albin

[Angie]

Altered is definitely an interesting sequel. I'm not sure if I liked it more than the first book, but I think I may have. It's been awhile. It provided the extra world building that I craved, but I won't even pretend to understand everything. It kind of makes my brain hurt to think about weaves, strands, threads, matter, time, souls, whatever! It's fascinating, but it's a lot to take in. Anyway, Altered picks up immediately after Crewel, with Adelice, Jost, and Erik on Earth. They're brought into the only functioning city in the area known as the Icebox. It's always night time without the help of lighting, since Arras sits directly overhead. Now Adelice needs to figure out how to get back up there so she can set things right.

My favorite part of Altered was the romance, or the end of a romance, so I'll start with that. I was on team Jost, but now I have switched! Adelice and Jost do have some scenes together that started to get a bit steamy, but he puts the breaks on that, which I was surprised by. But he has reasons, and they're legit, selfish, and misguided reasons, but he's sticking to them. Then they have this awesome fight, which totally makes sense, since it's a slightly different version of a fight I had with my long time boyfriend before we broke up. I was like, wow, real relationship problems! Not some stupid, out of nowhere fight! Of course, Erik is looming in the shadows of this love triangle, and we actually get to know him better! Hooray!

Now for the world building portion. Things get even more sexist in Altered! One of my biggest questions was why only women are spinsters, and it gets answered. I did like the answer, once everything was out in the open, since it makes a lot of sense. I won't talk about that part, since you'll probably want to read and find out on your own. But I do need to talk about the whole issue of men being more powerful than women. Part of the explanation for the female only spinsters was because men don't need more power. What?! So women with awesome world manipulating abilities are fine, but a man with the same abilities would be too powerful, since they're already more powerful than women. Wow. Spinsters can rip your ass out of existence, I'd say that's pretty darn powerful! I don't see how a man could be better than that? Oh well. Sexist world is sexist.

A lot of stuff happens in Altered, so it always held my attention. There's fights and explosions and unwinding and all kinds of mayhem. This certainly doesn't suffer from middle book syndrome. However, I was annoyed that every single character had some big reveal about them. No one was who they seemed, and that was a bit much. And there's some really weird twist about when this is all taking place, and there's a cameo from the real life person who is supposed to be responsible for the weaving technology. I did roll my eyes at this bit, but I think it worked in a way. Over all though, Altered is definitely a worthy sequel and I'm eager to find out how this all ends!

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.