The Cypress Project & The Department of Alterations by Gennifer Albin | Review

There are spoilers for the series as a whole, so beware!

The Cypress Project by Gennifer Albin
Series: Crewel World #0.1
Genres: Young Adult, Science Fiction, Dystopia
Release Date: 2013
Format: Digital, 60 pages
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Find it here: Wattpad || Goodreads

I like it well enough for a short story kind of thing, and I enjoyed the fact it gave light to how one of the girls who had been tested on felt while the process was going on, but in the end I felt it didn’t have the same punch to it as the full novels did. Which is understandable, since there were far less pages to build up to the final punch and it was more of a explanatory piece and a look into the before than it was something to explain a full revolution.

Something I definitely didn’t like about it was the fact that Lucy felt kind of like a carbon copy of Adelice. Maybe this was intentional and maybe it wasn’t, but either way, I wasn’t really fond of that. I’m also wondering who Lucy ended up becoming in Arras? Was she in the story (Loricel?), or was she gone like the others who had been modified?

I’m still pretty confused overall about some things. Oh well.

The Department of Alterations by Gennifer Albin
Series: Crewel World #0.5
Genres: Young Adult, Science Fiction, Dystopia
Release Date: September 25th 2012 by Tor Books
Format: ebook, 32 pages
Rating: ★★★★☆
Find it here: Tor || Goodreads

I enjoyed this one quite a lot more, possibly because it was in a much more familiar setting and I already knew the characters that I was being presented with. Of course, I didn’t know that right off the bat, but once it was revealed who we were reading about, I found myself pretty excited that we were getting a look into what had happened in the past. It also definitely gave another side to the character we read as, the tailor and the official both, as we’re not given much on either of them the first time we read about them in the books. They’re pretty much gone before you can do more than glimpse at them.

Definitely more interesting to me than The Cypress Project had been, though I’m not totally sure why that is. The familiarity was definitely a part, but there might have been something else. Whatever it is, definitely give this one a go if you’ve read the series.