The Power by Naomi Alderman

All over the world, women are discovering they have the power. There's Roxy, a white British teenager and the daughter of a gangster. There's Allie, a mixed-race girl who runs away after years of abuse and finds herself at a convent, revered as a goddess. There's Margot, an American mayor and one of the few older women to develop the power. And then Tunde, a young Nigerian man and aspiring journalist who captures early footage of the power in action. With a flick of their fingers, these women can inflict terrible pain - even death. Every man on the planet finds he's lost control. The day of the girls has arrived - but where will it end?

3.5 - overall really cool story I sometimes lost track of which storyline was for which person but that's mostly because I'm an idiot and generally not used to books where I have to follow multiple storylines and I'm an idiot. Still really enjoyed this.

This book is banana pants! I loved it. Imagine a world where women suddenly have the power – literally and metaphorically. A world where men are subjugated and oppressed, with limited access and rights. Does this world sound familiar at all to you?

Alderman does an incredible job of exploring the role of electrical power and skeins while also showing how power – regardless of who possesses it – can have terrifying and negative consequences.

Thought-provoking, with some memorable characters, but the allegory was as subtle as a sledgehammer, and became a bit tiresome. I feel like Alderman had the chance to make this more ambiguous and elegant, but bowed to the urge to send A Message, as well as wanting to tie the plot up a bit too neatly.

Still, I think this is compelling, and perhaps the moments when I went, “That is just too preposterous” are the point - maybe the broad strokes about violence, corrupting power, and gender stereotypes are meant to provoke that reaction, then make you reflect “wait . . . I suppose the reverse really is/has been true - maybe this story is precisely accurate, and our society is preposterous.”

I finished this last night, and I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. The writing is incredible, the storyline compelling, the framing device and illustrations clever, but I'm not quite sure what I was meant to take from the book. Women can be just as terrible as men given the opportunity?Power corrupts? The MRAs are right? I don't know how much that matters, but this is clearly a book that wants to Say Something - it's literary sci-fi in the mode of Margaret Atwood, who mentored the author. That influence clearly shows through, for good and bad (mostly good, I think) in the worldbuilding and the use of a framing device to provide context to the story. A glaring omission is the failure to engage with any other axes of oppression besides sex - while the leads are a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds, it doesn't really seem to inform how they react/act, and there are some asides that seem to nod at trans and/or NB people, but that's not dealt with at length except maybe with Jos and her boyfriend, but I wasn't sure what was happening there, whether it was a kink thing or something else. The story and the world will stick with me a long time, and the writing is excellent, full of allusions and odd touches of humor, alongside some of the most disturbing scenes I've read in a long time. (Serious content warning for sexual assault and violence throughout, by the way.) I wonder how I'll feel about this one in a year or two, but right now, it's one of the most intriguing books I've read recently.