The Power

I sat and stared at my Kindle for several minutes after finishing this book. The Power belongs on the same shelf as The Handmaid's Tale and American War. It's just amazing. The book begins in our world - but then takes a twist sideways. Teenage girls start manifesting an electrical power. They can zap people, with varying degrees of strength. It can be a pleasing, arousing tingle, or a warning jolt, or a breath-stealing, heart-stopping (literally) bolt. They soon discover that older women can also manifest the ability, but it has to be kick-started by a jolt from someone who already has it. (Even later in the book it's revealed that there's actually a muscle - they call it the skein - that controls the electricity, and women have, in the last twenty years or so, evolved to have that muscle.)

The book revolves between the points of view of a few different women and one man. The man is a journalist reporting on the emergence of the new power, while the women are prominent figures in the new world order that is emerging. Allie - Eve - becomes the leader of a new religion, Roxy is the daughter of a crime syndicate boss, and Margot is a mayor climbing the political ranks. Margot's daughter also gets a few chapters.

It's been pointed out that perhaps men are afraid of women having equal rights because they can't picture a world in which powerful women don't treat men the way powerful men have always treated women. They can only imagine men and women interacting as oppressors and oppressed, not as equals. Whereas feminism wants a world where we are truly equals. The Power imagines a world where women do become the oppressors, and men are forced into the feminine role. This is enforced by the framework the novel is told in - the novel itself is bracketed by letters between the “author,” presenting his historical novel, and a woman supposedly editing his work. Through the letters, you discover the novel is a slightly embellished history of their world, with about five thousand years between the events of the novel and the time of the letters. In the tone of the letters, you see the stereotypes switched - the man is apologetic and unsure while the woman is authoritative, patronizing, and a little bit sexist. “Oh, you silly boy, imagining a world where men were dominant! What a naughty idea! Don't you think men as soldiers is preposterous? Men are homemakers, women are the aggressive ones!” I think, if feminism achieves its goals through legislation, we will find true equality. If something like this were to happen - a drastic change, giving women a physical way to dominate suddenly, the outcome might indeed be more like the novel. Enough women have been traumatized that they'll want - need - to avenge themselves, and violent upheaval will result.

By the last third of the novel, we see powerful women and societies acting just the same as powerful men always have - I'd like to think we'd have learned from the men's mistakes, but humans are only human. Perhaps this is more realistic.

The book is NOT for the faint of heart. There are graphic rape, abuse, and violence scenes. They're not gratuitous - they serve the author's point - but they are still disturbing, as those scenes should be.

I'll be thinking about this book for a while. It's excellent, and I highly recommend it, if you can handle the dark themes.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

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.

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.”

Loved this book. For me, it puts a magnifying glass on the grotesque behaviours that men have and still do, inflict on women, simply because of gender, this warped idea that one is stronger than the other. As a man this book is a huge insight into the reality of the power struggle, along with being a great page turner and great thriller.

Amazing and horrible. Graphic, and hard to read. Thought-provoking, and thrilling. I can't say more good and bad about this book. The last pages of letters rocked me to my core and somehow pulled everything together in the most simple, yet revelatory way. I am still processing the entirety of this book, but that fact alone is enough for me to give it 5 stars (major TW for rape, genital mutilation, and obscene violence).


“Because they could.” That is the only answer there ever is.

Ok, really good and dark in parts but so is life.
If you're squimish, there will be moments in this book that will disturb you.
Getting over those however will be necessary to enjoy the rest of this work. It is worth it.
Really makes you think and I won't say more so I don't spoil it. But really, culture... What are we the product of? How long should we hold onto certain beliefs? When are we able to fully address them and evaluate what is helpful and what is holding us back as a species?
Very powerful work and we'll done.

I think this book is going to percolate with me for a while. Parts of it were very difficult to read, and reading it during the current spate of sexual harassment/assault allegations has felt...uncannily timely. The underlying premise of the book is interesting, but I found the structure of the sections unnecessary. I also found the prologue/epilogue a little too heavy-handed. Overall a good read in a genre I don't usually attempt.

This is a very thought-provoking book. The phrase “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” came to mind, particularly toward the end of the book. The author's addition of letters at the end of the story adds another layer to the book - who tells the story? who is writing history? when you turn our ‘norms' on their head, don't they sound ridiculous? This would be a good book club book.

I hated it. First of all the whole premise and story is, I think, wrong already. The historical pieces supposedly found would say that this isn't a new thing. So then the whole patriarchy and all that should have already evolved and shaped differently. Also, the fact that this would result in reverse sexism is stupid, unrealistic and bad. Not to mention something I don't want to read about. 

The characters were boring and the worldbuilding was worse. This is trying so hard to make some sort of point and comparison to the real world that it just makes no fucking sense in the story. Choices that are made to show something supposedly meaningful but really it just makes no sense for the world and the characters. 

Conclusion; fuck this, fuck this world, reverse sexism would never happen and is stupid. I hated it. 

3.5

Great premise. The pace for the first 35% was perfect and I couldn't put it down. Thereafter it slowed down quite a bit. The writing also got less appealing; I found my highlights to be a third of the ones from the first half. Got the feeling the author rushed the second half under pressure from the publisher. But hey I'm just speculating.

Recommended reading for all women though. It's a...satisfying read.

An interesting and well written book, with terrific ideas, that turns on it's head, all our comfortable preconceptions of gender stereotypes, and then completely kicks them to bits.

OK, that's the basics; did I enjoy it - I'm not sure, and I'm not sure why. I don't want to go into detail about the story as I don't do spoilers. Perhaps the book was a bit too deliberately trying to make us think, about the horrors of our current society by invoking a total inversion of our attitudes to everything.

Is it worth a read? Oh yes!

What a TREAT!!! I wasn't sure what to expect from this story or these characters and found myself surprised and affected by both. The “book within a book” portions were a little on the nose, but they are a small part of a much greater statement about gender, family, ambition, and the fact that power, no matter who wields it, always has the potential to corrupt.

Half way through the book I was thinking it was barely going to scrape 3 stars as it seemed too simple with fairy 2 dimensional character, men bad women good; however, as the book went on it developed a lot more nuance and asked some interesting questions about whether gender or power is more important in society when it comes to how we act towards each other.

The Epilogue was the icing on the cake, making the reader reassess everything they've previously read and at the same time making another interesting analogy of how different genders have been, and are, treated.

A remarkable book for its first 2/3. Genuinely. It hits topics and themes and ideas that are fascinating and bold. The book is worth reading for that on its own. The last third, however, jumps the shark a bit as it seems the author rushes to figure out how she's going to end the amazing tale she's woven. Looking back, it makes the book as a whole feel less character- or even idea-driven and reduces it simply to a wild plot. At times, it seems certain descriptions or scenes exist only as a pitch for some studio to make a film from this (which, in the right hands, would be a pretty kick ass film, hopefully with moments of depth and profundity).

And yet, before I could give this book three stars for the lackluster ending, there comes an epilogue just as mysterious and fascinating as the “appendix” to The Handmaid's Tale, from which this book gets great inspiration. That epilogue brings this book back to its place of mythic excellence and does in itself make the last bit of the novel worth getting through.

Really loved this - dystopian in all the best ways. Comparisons to Atwood are completely inevitable, I think (and Atwood's blurb is on the cover), but Alderman as akin to Atwood without being derivative. Multiple narratives are deftly interwoven, the countdown chronology is the drumbeat of a propulsive plot, and there are so many interesting questions raised by the world Alderman has conceived. The only thing I didn't love was the denouement. It felt a bit didactic in a way that none of the rest of the novel did, and I think it might have been stronger without it. Still, a great read!

So, The Power isn't the book I was expecting if I'm honest. I was expecting to follow a girl and her story as she discovered her new abilities. I thought it'd have more emphasis on the story telling aspect? The book feels like its more politically charged than that.

I have to admit that the book is of a good quality. The writing style definitely had more of a reserved style that I associate with academics. I felt the writing was right for the book, as it is supposed to be a documentation of a historical event. The writing tried to balance a traditional fictional style with this more reserved style, as we get insights into characters thoughts. I really felt these styles did not mesh well.

I wasn't emotionally attached to any of the characters. I think this was partially due to the writing style, the perspective almost felt removed from the plot with no emotional connection to the person being observed.

In the end, this just wasn't the book for me. I think this could easily be a good read if you go into it knowing what you'll be reading.