“People are always telling teenagers what to do and what they can’t do,” she points out. She notes that life on 22nd-century Arras isn’t all that different for teenagers from life on 21st-century Earth. program she once was enrolled in as a negative experience of “going through ridiculous channels” and “jumping through hoops” held by “people who knew nothing about teaching.” “I’m not very good with bureaucracy,” she explains, describing the Ph.D. The author, who holds a master’s degree in 18th-century women’s literature, says that the memories of her years in academia have had a significant impact on her fiction writing, particularly in conceptualizing the Guild. Albin wrote Altered to “explain how this world came to be,” she says. The story picks up after Adelice has fled Arras and is headed toward Earth with the two teenage boys she is torn between.

But there is a dark underside to being a Spinster, which causes Adelice to rebel against the Guild and everything it stands for.Īltered-the sequel to Crewel, due in October from FSG-is “progressively more science fictiony,” says Albin. “I was fascinated by this image, so I sat down and started writing about a girl in a tower who didn’t want to be there.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux pitched Crewel, set in the dystopian world of Arras, as “Mad Men meets The Handmaid’s Tale and Hunger Games.” Against her parents’ wishes, 16-year-old Adelice is tapped to become a Spinster-one who works the looms for the all-powerful and mysterious Guild that rules Arras-weaving the very fabric of life for its inhabitants: determining what people eat, where they live, how many children they will have, and even when they will die. “They’re creating an entire world,” Albin notes. The author describes an “ethereal” scene of half a dozen girls sitting in a tower sewing cloth, which cascades out of the windows and covers the world below them. Gennifer Albin explains that her inspiration for Crewel, the first novel in her YA Crewel World trilogy (2012), was sparked by the painting Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle by the Spanish-Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo.

Gennifer albin