The Power

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.