Book Blurb:
In The Power the world is a recognisable place: there’s a rich Nigerian kid who lounges around the family pool; a foster girl whose religious parents hide their true nature; a local American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But something vital has changed, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power – they can cause agonising pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world changes utterly.
My Review: 3.5 stars
The Power by Naomi Alderman is a fresh take on a feminist focused plot line. Rather than following the theme of women facing oppression (think women losing their voice in Vox and losing their freedom in The Handmaid’s Tale), the pattern is broken in Alderman’s novel by women gaining something instead.
In The Power, women suddenly become genetically altered and develop a skein, which enables them to generate electricity. The shift in gender dynamics from men to women is instantaneous and brings up the age-old questions: what if women held the power? What if women, rather than men, were the strong, and more powerful sex?
The story follows the POV of a few young girls in this past who are coming into their own with their new supernatural powers, as well as a young man who follows and reports on the skein phenomenon happening across the globe. Some of the gender and societal adjustments are small and happen slowly, while others arrive suddenly and forcefully and I loved getting to see this unfold through the eyes of the characters. This is a book within a book – the author is sending a draft of the book to friends to learn what their perceptions are. Would people really believe there was a time when women weren’t the powerful sex?
I found it interesting that Alderman chose a physical characteristic for women to develop in order to make them the more powerful sex. It shows how rooted and deep the gender divide is that women would need a huge physical change in order to flip the tables.
While I really liked the story and was intrigued, I do wish it delved more into why women developed this skein. There were parts of the “book” that did attempt to go into the history, but not in-depth enough to leave me feeling satisfied.
Quotes I liked:
However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that.”
“We’re only pretending everything is normal because we don’t know what else to do.”
“The way we think about our past informs what we think is possible today.”
“This is the trouble with history. You can’t see what’s not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something’s missing, but there’s no way to know what it was.”
