I'm not sure whether to rate this book 3 or 4*. I'm going with 3, but let's say my real rating is 3,5*. I have very mixed feelings about Crewel (I love the title, by the way. Such a clever world play). 
 There are so many awesome things about Crewel. The world is a huge part of that. As becomes clear in the book, Earth has been abandoned and fallen into decay; the world the main character, Adelice, lives in is called Arras. Everything in Arras is controlled, from bringing children into the world to marriage to who dies and when, by the Guild, which exercises its power through Spinsters. Arras is made out of weave that some people, mainly women, can see, touch, and manipulate. Every person is a thread that can be ripped out, cleaned, or rewoven. Every place is a patch of weave. The women who can see and manipulate this weave are tested at a young age and, if found talented, brought to one of the coventries for training. 
 Sixteen-year-old Adelice is one of these gifted young women, but unlike most other girls, she doesn't consider it an honour to be chosen to become a Spinster. It would mean leaving her family and her life behind, never to see them again. Her parents have always trained her to not show her gift to anyone, and that is what she tries to do when she is tested. Unfortunately, she slips up, resulting in the Guild's people coming to retrieve her for Spinster training. 
 The story in itself is interesting and the world behind it is just so fascinating, especially as more and more things are explained as you read on, rather than everything being revealed and made clear instantly. The reader's understanding of Arras slowly grows and realisation dawns that this is not a perfect society at all; it's an oligarchy in which every single thing is controlled and everyone who dares to step even the tiniest bit out of line is removed or re-programmed. The Guild can influence every single person in Arras by having their thread manipulated; they even go so far as to remove people and then change other people's memories so they won't remember the removed ever existed. It's crazy, it's creepy, and it's very intriguing in a YA book. 
 The problems I had with this book are mainly character-wise. First of all, there's yet another main character who is sixteen years old and behaves as if she is in her early twenties. I understand why YA authors feel like they should have YA characters, but why can't they be older than sixteen? No real girl of sixteen ever behaves the way sixteen-year-old girls do in most YA novels. If only a few years had been added, that would have been great already. 
 My irritation about that aside, Adelice was an okay character, but she felt... forced, a lot of the time. Fake. She's constantly making clever remarks to everyone and I love a good, sassy heroine, but throughout Crewel, I just wanted to shout at her 90% of the time to keep her big mouth shut. She's talking back to the people who have her in their clutches for them to do what they want, who have power over the life and death of her family, and she just keeps making jabs at inappropriate times. It made her feel... well, stupid, which is, I think, the last thing any author wants his or her main character to feel like. (On the plus side, that stupidity did match the fact that she's only sixteen.) 
 Most of the other characters didn't feel entirely fleshed out. Some of them, such as Cormac, genuinely gave me the creeps; others, such as May, were genuinely adorable. Most, however, like Erik, Pryana, Enora, Maela, and Loricel, felt a little one-dimensional and I couldn't really get into them. When something bad happens to a character and I hardly feel anything about that, I didn't care about the character enough, and I felt that way a lot throughout Crewel. 
 Finally, my biggest pet peeve that is only getting bigger with each YA book I read: The love triangle. WHY MUST THERE BE A LOVE TRIANGLE?! Yes, Adelice appears to have made her choice at the end of the book, and I desperately hope she'll just stick with that choice and not spend the next two books attempting to decide who to choose; but why was this love triangle necessary at all? Even worse - (view spoiler)[ the two objects of her affection turn out to be brothers in the end... (hide spoiler)] Which, by the way, is something I saw coming from the moment (view spoiler)[ their eyes are mentioned, because whenever two people have the same eyes in books (especially YA books), they're probably related. (hide spoiler)] That happened more often, too: Something was revealed with a big gasp and a startling realisation on Adelice's part, and I could only think that 90% of the readers probably saw this coming at least two pages ago (usually more). It takes a bit of the fun out of the story. It's such a clever world and yet some things happened that are explained in such detail that a toddler probably could have understood it. 
 All right. Rant over. It was a good book and one I enjoyed, so definitely 3*. I'm going to read the rest of the trilogy, because I really want to find out what happens. After this, though, I'm going to try my hardest to make sure the next YA book I pick up has no love triangle in it or I might start throwing books around (and that says something, given the fact that I usually treat books as if they are holy).