Altered by Gennifer Albin

There's something going on lately with the dystopian genre. There are a ridiculous number of them featuring female protagonists. Not that I have anything against that per se, but it seems wildly disproportionate. Off the top of my head, for the girls there is: The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins, The Pretties Series by Scott Westerfeld, the Divergent Series by Veronica Roth, and now the Crewel World series by Gennifer Albin. The only one featuring a male protagonist that I can come up with is The Maze Runner Series which I haven't read yet. It's possible that there's more out there and I just need to go looking, however it seems odd that I haven't tripped over them yet.

One of the hallmarks of the female dystopian novel is love triangle. Most of them feature a subplot wherein the protagonist must pick between two boys. The boys are generally representative of two sides of this fictional world. Crewel World follows the same general set up. Adelice must pick between two brothers (as it turns out) Jost and Erik.

At the end of the first book, Adelice escapes Arras with the two brothers to Earth. Most of Altered, the second book, is centered around developing the mystery surrounding the two worlds and the relationships between the two boys and Adelice.

Generally, I find the love triangle subplot kind of annoying. Done wrong, the protagonist comes off as either chronically indecisive or pathologically cold. Albin struck a good balance. Adelice's romantic problems make sense and the complex relationship between the two brothers factors strongly into what happens.

Overall, it's a good continuation from the first book. It adds strongly to the sinister elements already present and pulls the world into sharper focus.