NAOMI Alderman’s latest novel The Power is the unholy child of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream. It is contemporary feminist speculative fiction that asks the hard questions, that never shuts its eyes to the cruelty all humans are capable of, regardless of their gender. It pulls no punches. It’s also a fantastic page-turner, a smart, capable thriller that sensitively handles the coming of age of its young female protagonists as they navigate a world where they are suddenly the possessors of massive power and yet remain in danger because of it.

In a recognisable future, women are at the top of the societal food chain. Gender wars have been actual wars. Glass ceilings have been shattered physically. And when a revolution is literally ignited, passing from woman to woman, setting each aflame with want and need and power, the world evolves into something new, yet somehow no different than what we know of.

The Power is presented as a historical novel by a man in a society run entirely by women, as he attempts to chronicle what may have happened to cause patriarchy to collapse. He speculates of a world in which men were not always the weaker sex, in which perhaps women had not always ruled with the innate power present in their bodies. He sends this book to Naomi, a successful female writer, to ask her advice on the matter, who tells him that perhaps he’d have more luck publishing under a female pseudonym.

Imagining an alternative world in which patriarchy is replaced with matriarchy raises some interesting questions
It’s a clever bookending of the novel, a fun way for Alderman to write herself into the story as a character in a world in which all the traditional issues associated with female writers are now the norm for male writers. The point, of course, is to ask the same question again and again: can there ever truly be a balance of power between genders? “The shape of power is always the same,” Alderman writes. “[I]t is the shape of a tree. Root to tip, central trunk branching and rebranching, spreading wider in ever-thinner, searching fingers. The shape of power is the outline of a living thing straining outward, sending its fine tendrils a little further, and a little further yet. This is the shape of rivers leading to the ocean — the trickles to rivulets, the rivulets to streams, the streams to torrents, the great power gathering and gushing, becoming mightier to hurl itself into the great marine might.”

One day young women all over the world find themselves able to generate electricity with their bodies, specifically via a skein of muscle that lies over their collarbones. In the world of The Power, women find that they, too, have their own version of this brute force. Not just teen women use this electricity; it can also ignite or awaken in older women. Soon, every woman is able to send a jolt of power into whomever or whatever she so pleases — some are able to control it better than others, some are stronger than a dozen women, but inevitably, every single woman the world over, at puberty or beyond, has the ability to generate electricity at will with her body. Not a single one is afraid to use it. Most relish in it, joyous at no longer having to be afraid.

“She cuppeth the lightning in her hand. She commandeth it to strike. There’s a crackling flash and a sound like a paper snapper. She can smell something a bit like a rainstorm and a bit like burning hair. The taste under her tongue is of bitter oranges. The short man is on the floor now. He’s making a crooning wordless cry. His hand is clenching and unclenching. There’s a long, red scar running up his arm from his wrist. She can see it even under the blond hair: it’s scarlet, patterned like a fern, leaves and tendrils, budlets and branches. Her mum’s mouth is open, she’s staring, her tears are still falling.”— Excerpt from the book
Is it a virus? A mutant, evolutionary reaction to a nerve gas? A feminist conspiracy come to life? Witchcraft? Whatever it is, it is first assumed to be short-lived — an antidote to the women’s new-found ability will be developed and life and power balances will return to normal; though of course, who gets to decide what ‘normal’ is? Why must the norm be patriarchy and a male-dominated world?

The Power is told from four perspectives, four protagonists carrying the narrative forward evenly: Roxy the powerful, Allie the holy mother, Margot the politician, and Tunde the journalist, whose career is made when he films a young girl in Nigeria use her power. His is the only male perspective in the novel, a vital one if we are to know how the other half feels. Roxy’s power unleashes when she is witness to a violent crime in her own home. Her father, a London mob boss, takes her on as his right-hand woman, her unlimited ability helping her become a vital part of his dodgy and dangerous business deals. Allie uses her power to get away from an abusive foster family, and by listening to the voice inside her head she is able to take on the role of Mother Eve, gathering dozens of young women under her wing as she creates something more than a cult, closer to a religion based on this great new seismic change in gender balance. Margot finds that her new abilities allow her to take over political office in ways she had not imagined, while her own daughter struggles with the same power. The women’s lives interconnect at some point, though each has her own path to tread, too.

Across the world, women-led states arise. There are sexual revolutions of the violent kind. Men are controlled in the way women have been forever — Sultana’s Dream once again comes to mind, given that the world Hossain created also had the men safely ensconced within walls and removed from all decision-making. It was a perfect utopia for women, but Hossain never ventured into the world of the subordinate men. In Alderman’s novel it is clear that the men aren’t happy and it is exactly because they are now being forced to live the lives women always have. There is still rape and war and gendered crime and murder and domestic violence — it’s just not the men that are committing it. Is it more shocking to see women commit heinous crimes, particularly rape and sexual abuse, than to see men do the same? Why? Because we assume women to be the gentler, milder, nicer gender? Alderman is provocative, bold and ruthless in pointing out that this is an entirely baseless assumption — a patriarchal, sexist assumption.

If women had the brute physical strength to simply take what they wanted, to assume control over all society, to elevate themselves in the pecking order, why do we assume they would be nicer, or more nurturing about it? Why do we assume women in general are gentler or kinder people? Is one gender more prone to violence naturally, or because they have the greater physical power? Armed with the ability to defend themselves ruthlessly, women may well react to the heady mix of absolute power and absolute strength in the same way men always have in extreme situations. Gendered violence, sexism, control over reproduction, and wars would all still exist, says Alderman, only with the flow of control moving in the opposite direction.

Alderman is a writer with many interests and abilities. She’s part of Granta magazine’s ‘Best of’, she’s won the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers, she’s been mentored by Margaret Atwood, she’s been a game designer and is co-creator and writer of the training app Zombies, Run!. The Power is a lightning strike of a novel — bright, fierce, one that will leave you shocked, possibly because its very premise appears to be so simple. In the afterword, Alderman references a pair of images used in the novel, both of which will be familiar to Pakistani readers as two of the best known artefacts found at Moenjodaro. Alderman explains why she chose to adapt and use them as part of her alternative history: “We don’t know much about the culture of Moenjodaro — there are some findings that suggest that they may have been fairly egalitarian in some interesting ways. But despite the lack of context, the archaeologists who unearthed them called the soapstone head […] ‘Priest King’, while they named the bronze female figure […] ‘Dancing Girl’. They’re still called by those names. Sometimes I think the whole of this book could be communicated with just this set of facts and illustrations”. And in that, she’s proved her point.

Believe the hype! This outstanding book has garnered a lot of attention and praise lately as equality and women's rights are seemingly under threat in the USA. It merits ever plaudit lauded upon it, as it takes the reader on an incredible journey through gender politics set in the world we all live in today. This is no futuristic dystopia, no post-apocalyptic warzone, this is a novel that creeps into the familiar and flips everything on its head. 
The power of the title, appears in teenage girls, who suddenly have the ability to generate intense pain and suffering, and even death, using their bare hands. It's also the shift in power that accompanies it, as women take control of the world as men become "the weaker sex" and start to live in fear of the power their female counterparts wield over them.
Told from the point of view of multiple characters - a rich kid turned wannabe journalist, a foster girl whose super religious parents hide her truth, the daughter of a family of London gangsters, an American politician and her daughter,  this is a thought-provoking piece of writing. As Lord Acton once said "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely", a statement that certainly holds true within the pages of this incredible book. Clear some time in your life for this book, because once 'The Power' has you under its spell, you aren't going to be able to pull yourself away from it.

The framing narrative saved it. The concept is clever but it feels a little shallow. And I felt almost as if it undermined feminism.

The Power tells the story of what happened when teenage girls around the world simultaneously developed an electricity-conducting new muscle (the 'skein'). They could inflict immense pain just by touch, which lead to a sudden and dramatic change in the balance of power. Would the new world order be a more just, equal and fair one? Or would The Power corrupt absolutely?

The Power is told from the perspective of four characters - Tunde, a Nigerian journalism student who finds his purpose in documenting the new revolution; Margot, an ambitious American career politician with a teenage daughter coming into her power; Allie, who reinvents herself after escaping from her abusive foster parents; and Roxy, a tough girl from a powerful London crime family. The novel charts the history of the revolution from its tentative beginnings to its violent conclusions, and is an intriguing, fascinating, important and, yes, powerful tale.

The Power is an intense, thought-provoking take on how society might be if women were afforded more physically destructive power. Filled with feminism and fire, this was a brilliantly written, dark, and thrilling tale. I was captivated by the first page.

I adored this novel and I'm so sorry I didn't fully review it on my website. I've had a rough year and am just catching up with it all. I am adding a link to where I did cover it though.
The whole idea of this novel is incredible and Naomi follows all the paths with great detail and logic. I'm really hoping she goes back to this world because I would love to know more

Reviewed for the Arthur C. Clarke Shadow Jury, 2017

I have loved some of Alderman’s earlier work – her debut Disobedience (2006) was one of the first books that I reviewed online – and have read her assiduously, with great pleasure. Yet this fourth novel, her breakthrough book, left me unsure and unsettled.  While friends and critics turned out in numbers to praise its ingenuity and confidence, its bold engagement with the dynamics of power and gender, I hung back and sat on my immediate reaction. Which was: Yes, all those things, but… I couldn’t decisively put my finger on what the ‘but’ was; it was just there, throwing up a barrier between the book and me.  At the same time, I couldn’t dismiss it; I was niggled. It stayed with me. So much so, that when it came time for creating my Clarke shortlist I knew The Power had to be on it. Whatever my personal reservations, it was clearly one of the more thought-provoking and eloquent of the submitted books. I felt I owed it a re-read, to test my first response.

It’s rare for me to re-read a book within six months; even more rare to re-read a book I didn’t love on first contact. It was a salutary experience. My problem the first time around was one part character to one part central conceit. On second reading the characters still bothered me – I just don’t believe in them, Roxy in particular – but because I already knew the lineaments of the plot they didn’t distract me so completely from the novel’s other qualities. Instead the thematic issues came more strongly to the fore, about which more below.  It wasn’t a negative experience, not at all. This time around I had a much greater appreciation for Alderman’s craft, for her facility with language and the seduction of the book’s narrative voice. I like her breathless, short-sentenced style and always have; whereas Colson Whitehead is all about the comma, Alderman is all about the full stop. Because I floated over the action this time, observing from a position of foreknowledge and expectation, I found much more pleasure in the words themselves. It slipped down easy as you like; a bit wearisome towards the high-octane ending but still very lovely.

More than that I could see how my reaction to the novel – the unshakeable instinct I have to argue with it – is in some ways its best effect.  It has one of those ‘rollicking’ plots that publicists love to talk about but for the purposes of the Clarke Award (and any award really) its other identity as confrontational thought experiment is the more important.  It’s not completely successful in my opinion but it’s always bold. There is a lot of intellectual pleasure to be had from it: unpicking it, pushing at its knottier parts, testing how far it can justify itself.  In that sense it does precisely what I want a good science fiction novel to do: it makes me work; it isn’t easy.

The book’s ‘what if’ premise is straightforward.  In a world very much like ours adolescent girls suddenly develop the ability to discharge electrical currents through their hands, generated by a previously undetected organ, a ‘skein’, along their collarbone.  At first it’s just the teenagers who have ‘the Power’ but soon they begin to awaken it in older women, until the vast majority of the female population has the capacity to inflict intense pain and extreme violence at will.  The destabilisation of the gendered order is rapid and ferocious. Social and cultural collectives at all levels, from family to nation state, religious congregation to criminal syndicate, are forced to re-evaluate the patriarchal power dynamics that so completely underlie the government of people and the self in our world.

We witness the emergence and impact of the Power through the experiences of four characters.  Allie is an abused foster-kid with a voice in her head which may be the manifestation of her survival instinct or the actual words of God.  After killing her stepfather and running away from home she washes up at a convent in North America where, following the voice’s instructions, she establishes herself as Mother Eve. Initially an internet phenomenon, she rapidly becomes the world leader of a new matriarchal religion. Roxy is the illegitimate daughter of a London crime boss who first discovers the Power when her mother is murdered by a rival gang. This leads her to exact a revenge that catapults her head first into her father’s drug-dealing empire, where her superior physical strength sees her take prime position over her brothers. Tunde, our only male protagonist, is a Nigerian student who captures one of the earliest uses of the Power on his mobile phone. He sells the footage to CNN and, realising that something extraordinary is happening, embarks on a career of freelance journalism, travelling around the world as it is shaken by change.  Finally, there is Margot, the only grown adult amongst the cast. While Allie, Roxy and Tunde are all teenagers (or very recently teenagers), Margot is in the middle of a political career.  Although she struggles to come to terms with the implications for the future of her two daughters she also sees an opportunity to increase her political capital and embarks on a meteoric rise to power.

As the main arc of the novel unfolds around them the stories of these four protagonists follow familiar narrative grooves. There are betrayals, near death experiences, doomed love affairs.  There are no real surprises but it’s certainly entertaining (to the extent that the action sometimes verges on soap opera) and there are some crunchy referents to contemporary culture.  Allie’s messianic preaching spreads through social media, making it possible for her to influence audiences around the world; the same technology allows her to tap into emerging goddess theologies in the world’s first matriarchy in Bessapara, formerly Moldova, where much of the action of the latter half of the novel takes place.  Margot’s campaign to become state Governor and then a Senator is predicated on voters’ preference for displays of force and threats of violence. In one of the most prescient and horrifying sections of the book she attacks her political opponent on stage; unable to control her anger, she shocks him with the Power.  Although she apologises profusely the polls suggest that she will lose. Except she doesn’t. She wins in a landslide.

It turns out the voters lied… They said they respected hard work, commitment and moral courage. They said that the candidate’s opponent had lost their vote the moment she gave up on reasoned discourse and calm authority. But when they went into the voting booths in their hundreds and thousands, and tens of thousands, they’d thought, You know what, though, she’s strong. She’d show them. (p169)

The book came out in October last year, a full month before Donald Trump was elected President and only four months after Brexit, but it’s impossible not to read 2016’s (and now 2017’s) political upsets in Margot’s experience. The toxic machismo and aura of threat that hangs over Western politics is writ large here.

All this action occurs bracketed by a frame narrative, in which a male author called Neil Adam Armon (an anagram of Naomi Alderman) writes to a female author called Naomi.  In their exchange Naomi expresses an oozing condescension to Neil, who is apparently grateful for a moment of her time.  He has written a novel – the one we are reading – in an attempt to broaden the appeal of theories that he has previously expressed in non-fiction. We come to understand that, although contemporary to our world, this novel is set over five thousand years before the frame. It’s a historical novel in other words; or a mytho-historical novel at least. In Neil’s timeline women are and apparently have always been the dominant sex, while men are ‘more kind, more gentle, more loving and naturally nurturing.’ (p333) The purpose of his story is to question the inevitability of this dynamic, a purpose reinforced by the illustrations of artefacts that are inserted throughout the text.  They hint at a pre-Power patriarchal world, which is entirely alien to Neil and Naomi’s lived experience. He imagines the events that flipped the switch on the male/female power dynamic, so that vice became versa.

As we witness riots in Dehli, uprisings in Saudi Arabia and the founding of Bessapara we are repeatedly shown scenes of women turning the tables on their male oppressors and abusers. The impact depends upon the context.  Alderman’s decision to set the book largely in Moldova, which is notorious for sex trafficking, and to follow Tunde as he chases the most controversial stories, means that we are exposed to extreme expressions of change including the mutilation, rape, enslavement and murder of men. We see a muted analogue in Margot’s storyline where a female news presenter slowly gains control of the show while her male co-host is relegated to lifestyle and fashion stories.  Similarly we see how Tunde’s journalism is easily and readily appropriated by a female colleague. Sexism towards men is proportionately and appropriately designed to the pre-Power expressions of sexism towards women.  By Naomi and Neil’s time we are to understand that the violence of the early years has outlived its usefulness and a cultural coercion not dissimilar to our current state of affairs is thoroughly embedded.

My problems with the book begin here, with its narrow focus on how power acts on people and shapes the world.  This is most evident for me in its almost complete lack of engagement with intersectionality. Switching the current of gendered power dynamics isn’t as simple as turning the hourglass and watching the sand all fall the other way. The novel only engages tangentially with how gendered experience is impacted and nuanced by race, sexuality and disability. The novel seems unconscious of how power is complicated by its unequal distribution within genders, or by white, cis, straight privilege. Tunde, who is black-African, and Allie, who is bi-racial, don’t reflect at all on how this effects their experiences of a post-Power world.  Affluence and poverty are also flattened out. It isn’t clear, for example, how poor girls in Margot’s America might fare differently to her own daughters.

Similarly, there are no overt LGBTQ characters in the book. There are anomalies in how the Power exhibits. Some women don’t have a skein at all, while others – like Margot’s eldest daughter, Jocelyn – have a condition that makes it difficult or painful for them to use it.  There are a minority of young men who have a muted version of it. Some readings have adopted these as analogies for variations in sexuality or transgendered identities but I don’t find this particularly convincing. First because it’s unnecessary to have analogies when you could just have LGBTQ characters; and second because this plays into a biological reading of sexuality and trans identity as a deviancy or illness that I find distasteful and offensive.

During a debate about this with a colleague it was suggested to me that any lack of intersectional awareness is a function of the frame narrative. Neil, the putative author of the historical fiction we are reading, is writing from his own experience as a (presumably) white male and so is unconscious of the omission. His own prejudices are playing out on the page.  Which is an interpretation that makes sense on the level of literary devices but no sense at all thematically.  If The Power is about power generically, and gendered power in particular, then these seem like major omissions.

Academic and critic Laura Tisdall has also pointed out how the book fails to consider nuances of women’s embodied experience on a practical level and how biological differences between male and female bodies matter.

In physical terms, women are not solely oppressed as a sex class because they are physically weaker than men, but because they carry, bear and often nurse children. Despite their physical inferiority to women, men in The Power still won’t have to deal with unwanted pregnancy, or pregnancy as a result of rape; they won’t have to spend nine months pregnant and then give birth; they still won’t have to take any time out from work at all to have their own biological children. This means that the nature of their oppression is not the simple flip-side of women’s oppression, but a different kind of subjugation.

We witness numerous acts of physical violence and brutality committed by women against men in the latter half of the book, many of which have direct parallels with the experiences of women pre-Power.  We are introduced, for example, to the practice of ‘curbing’, a procedure whereby young boys are genitally mutilated so that they can only be sexually aroused by electrical stimulation.  The equivalency to female genital mutilation (FGM) is quite clear. But there is no evidence that the strategies women develop to establish their power go beyond tit-for-tat. How, for example, might the experience of childbirth and parenting be reconfigured? How might standards of beauty change? Again, it’s possible to blame a lack of consideration on our fictional author Neil, but it’s a big burden for the frame narrative to bear.

It’s not a particularly strong frame to begin with. Its purpose is to reinforce the thought-experiment but it’s flimsy for me in several ways. To begin with I’m unconvinced by the mid-twentieth century flippancy in which sexism is expressed in the correspondence between Neil and Naomi; it’s so blatant as to be almost silly. Sexism in contemporary Western culture is corrosive because it’s coded and sub-textual and I’m unclear why Alderman would chose to write it otherwise.  My bigger problem though arises from the claim that Neil makes for his text as a historical novel because there is no attempt to write historically.  The sense that he is writing about an alien time, biblical in its equivalent distance to us, is very limited. You would imagine, for example, that Neil would dwell longer on the things that make this time-period distinct from his own. That he would explain more. That he would elaborate on male power and culture, given that it is the most fantastical and unbelievable element of his story.  That he would be more interested in how men experienced this cataclysmic change from their perspective.  As it is we get very little evidence of change between his time and this past time, other than the gender switch. The technologies, cultural practices and geo-political make-up appear the same, implying that in the event we were annihilated back to the stone age we would end up in the same place five thousand years from now.  That seems both highly unlikely and desperately fatalistic.

In common with the majority of books on my personal shortlist – quite by accident – it seems to me that Alderman is ultimately writing not about gender, and not even about power, but about the possibility of change. The Power underlines that our systems of governance and socio-cultural practices are poisoned at the root by inequalities of power. It shows us is that simplistic responses to this problem will only perpetuate the rot in a different pattern.  Standard rhetoric around change – if we did this rather than that, if we were strong rather than weak, if women ruled the world rather than men – is meaningless.  Even the most extreme of intervention married to this logic is hopeless. And here is my final, unresolved qualm about this book: Yes, I agree, but what is the alternative?  In his review Nick pointed to an article – How to build a feminist utopia – in which Alderman put forward her response to this question and yet I find no evidence of her suggestions in the novel. It’s a lack.

So I’m left angry, stimulated, confused, impassioned and frustrated by The Power. Again. Even more than the first time I feel like it’s a red flag to my bull and I just want to keep charging at it.  There was a good deal of surprise amongst the shadow jury that Alderman wasn’t on the official shortlist.  Even in spite of all my reservations, I certainly think it superior to several of the actual contenders. Of course, we decided to give it the sixth slot on our shadow list.  It came up throughout our discussions and I was a strong advocate for including it, not because it’s perfect – none of the books are – but because it’s such a thorny creature. After two readings, much discussion and writing nearly 3000 words about it, I’m still equivocal and undecided.  In his review of Azanian Bridges Paul described Wood’s book as ‘splintery’ and I think I would use the same word to finally describe The Power.  It’s well and truly under my skin and sticking with me.

Since I read The Power (I’m still churning through a review backlog, apologies!) it has famously gone on to become the first science fiction work to scoop the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction. That probably tells you all you need to know about the calibre of this novel – although I’m not sure I would classify it as SF myself (maybe because I think labels are for jam jars, not for books).

“It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”

In The Power, something has recently shifted in the dynamic of the world. Slowly, teenage girls appear to be evolving the capacity to inflict agonising pain and even death through their hands. This power can be traced to a ‘skein’, undiscovered as dormant in most older women – although anyone with the power can activate another woman’s skein for her. In a short period of time, the entire dynamic of the world changed. What would happen if women could protect themselves and each other? What would happen if one gender could literally wield huge power over another? How do we see gender dynamics when the power is placed elsewhere?

“One of them says, ‘Why did they do it?’ And the other answers, ‘Because they could.’ That is the only answer there ever is.”

Frankly – I adored this book. It’s been my go-to birthday present to people for months. It doesn’t just flip gender roles, it explores gender based violence; sexual violence; family; morality; organised religion; and military motivation in a systematic way – holding up a dystopian mirror to the reality we live in through a rollicking story focusing on the convergence of a diverse group of young women. I spent the first half of the book thinking “fuck yeah!” and internally high-fiving, and by the second half battling an increasing queasiness as Alderman forces her readers to think clearly about the balance of power. If you haven’t read this one yet – make it your next one.

This is a distinctly feminist dystopic novel (power dynamics are why women are oppressed) but I guess in my heart I didn't want to read a novel where women are so quickly as bad as men are now.

Naomi Alderman’s novel ‘The Power’ is a well-deserved winner of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017.

Naomi takes the idea of a change to which gender holds the reins of power and moves it along logical lines to a logical outcome, the end of the book gives this logical progression a wonderful twist.

One day young women wake a power which has been developing in them over a number of years which gives them the ability to channel electricity through them, storing it in an organ called a ‘skein’.

As this develops through the world, women start to control various power centres and men fight back at the gender inequalities raised by the change in their societal position.

One of the funniest, but most poignant changes is the change in gender positions of the newscasters throughout the book.

Written in an episodic fashion reminiscent of ‘World War Z’, the story develops at a cracking pace, in a horrifying but true way which I won’t spoil, but when the only model of holding power is that which has been developed in our patriarchal, capitalist society, the story’s outcomes ring sadly true.

A wonderful novel which should be read by men as well as women as a pointer to what is wrong in our current society, and as a well-written piece of speculative fiction.

The disturbing factor about the concept at the heart of this book is how much changes when women are suddenly given the means to physically control everyone around them. 

The power spreads and the world reacts in a number of different ways, as men find themselves subject to the kinds of assaults and degradation familiar to women the world over. 

Fascinating read but I'm giving it four stars because I felt the historical framing shifted the focus away from the human stories we had invested in.

I read the first ~120 pages of this [Bailey’s] Women’s Prize winner and skimmed the rest. Alderman imagines a parallel world in which young women realize they wield electrostatic power that can maim or kill. In an Arab Spring-type movement that kicks off in Saudi Arabia, women start to take back power from oppressive societies. You’ll cheer as women caught up in sex trafficking fight back and take over. The movement is led by Allie, an abused child who starts off by getting revenge on her foster father and then takes her message worldwide, becoming known as Mother Eve. Her sidekick is Roxy Monke, a British gal who’s had her own vengeance on the men who’ve wronged her. Other major characters include Mayor Margot Cleary, whose daughter is one of the first to discover her power, and Tunde Edo, the one central male character, who becomes a citizen journalist on the frontline of the women’s movement.

Alderman has cleverly set this up as an anthropological treatise cum historical novel authored by “Neil Adam Armon” (an anagram of her own name, of course), complete with documents and drawings of artifacts. “The power to hurt is a kind of wealth,” and in this situation of gender reversal women gradually turn despotic. They are soldiers and dictators; they inflict genital mutilation and rape on men. I enjoyed what I read, especially the passages mimicking the Bible, but felt a lack of connection with the characters and didn’t get a sense of years passing although this is set over about a decade. This is most like Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy – Alderman’s debt to Atwood is made explicit in the dedication as well as the acknowledgments – so if you really like those books, by all means read this one. My usual response to such speculative fiction, though, even if it describes a believable situation, is: what’s the point? As with “Erewhon,” the best story in Helen Simpson’s collection Cockfosters, the points about gender roles are fairly obvious.

I can see why the Women’s Prize judging panel went for this one, but it wouldn’t have been my choice.

The Power is a really interesting novel that looks at the way men and woman are viewed and treated in society. In this novel teenage girls discover they have the power to inflict pain through their hands. Society becomes scared and outraged and wants to lock the girls away to protect society but it soon becomes apparent that the girls are awakening the power in older women. Soon all women have the power.

The first half of this book feels very empowering. It’s fascinating to see women going about their lives and knowing that they won’t ever be hurt as they leave a club late at night, who know absolutely that they can protect themselves even if they walk home alone. Suddenly it’s men who are being warned not to walk home alone at night, that are being warned not to behave in a way that may provoke girls with the power.

As The Power goes on Alderman begins to rebut the notion that woman are instinctively nurturing and caring. It becomes a more uncomfortable to read, it is unsettling and at times horrifying.  I’ve seen criticism of this book from people who haven’t read it saying that making men victims doesn’t make anything any better. I completely agree with that statement but it’s absolutely not what this book is about. The Power is all about empowering women but then looking at what happens when they have all that power, and just like now, it’s not all good. The power becomes a corrupting force for some of the women, they turn power-hungry and want to be on top at all costs, which is how it is in reality – too much power is always corrupting. I couldn’t understand the motives of some of the characters, I couldn’t identify or sympathise with what some of them did and it was right that this happened. I’ll be honest and say that I was a little concerned that The Power would be a man-hating novel but it isn’t, it really does look at what happens when the people that hold the power lose it, and others gain it. It’s terrifying, but also fascinating.

The novel is framed by letters from a male scholar to Naomi asking her opinion on his latest novel, The Power, and it ends with her thoughts after she read it. The last line in this novel is brilliant, one of the best final lines I’ve read in a long time. It left me thinking for a long time after I put the book down.

This is a fascinating novel, it will really make you think and it’ll stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. I definitely recommend it.

The Power is out now!

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The concept of this book really excited me, and I still think it's brilliant. But it wasn't always executed well. The rape culture metaphors became heavy-handed from time to time, some of the characters are walking stereotypes (I assume the author isn't from England, because the way she wrote Roxy was bordering on embarrassing at times... just my opinion though) and the plot threads that I found the most interesting never really reached a conclusion. The framing device made the whole thing less enjoyable for me, made it harder for me to suspend disbelief fully, though I can understand why she did it... a nod to The Handmaid's Tale?

I think this book is important though. I can't think of the last time I read a book with so many female protagonists in it. I just feel like it didn't reach its full potential, or that it needed a few more redrafts before it was sent out into the world.

This is a wonderful book. 

Alderman has provided an insightful and eye-opening account of our own society by using the power as a metaphor for gender relations in the 21st century. This book astutely profiles contemporary issues through the lens of a fictional dystopia. 

The characters are strong, believable and engaging, and the narrative is sublime. The structure used is extremely effective - the letters between the writer and his publisher enhance the story and add further fuel to questions over the reliability of the historical accounts. 

The book is excellent.

I was given an ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.

I’m not quite sure how to review this book without doing it an injustice. On the surface, The Power is a brilliant piece of dystopian science fiction. Fast-paced, gripping and extremely dark – this is not one for the faint-hearted.

I’ve heard a lot of people calling The Power a feminist book, though I’m not sure I agree. On starting, the naïve, optimistic side of me hoped for a utopian, if not happy ending. A world where women would finally be equals – equally powerful and equally strong.

Boy, was I wrong.

This book isn’t about equality, rather the complete upheaval of power from one end of the spectrum to the other. This is what happens when the repressed, beaten and raped suddenly gain the upper hand (quite literally). With the power to inflict great pain, or even death, at a flick of the wrist – you can pretty much guess what happens…

Yep. No happy utopian endings in sight.

“It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”

The Power is an intensely absorbing and gripping read. It will suck you in, chew you up and won’t spit you out until the very last page. This book will ruin your life for the time it takes to read it, which turns out not to be very long because you simply won’t be able to put it down.

This novel was thankfully short.
The characters lacked depth and the plot became very weak after a good start.
Disappointing.

This was a really difficult book to review, as the reading experience was very disturbing, at the same time as being empowering and thought provoking.

I didn't know much about this book when I started reading it, so it was great at the beginning to try to work out what was happening and why. I enjoyed following the experiences of the different main characters and found the premise very original.

This book was tense and engaging throughout. It also made me think a lot about gender and the way we treat each other.

I chose this book mainly due to the fact that it would be like a Margaret Atwood and also I thought it would be a possibility for the social private book group I am a member of. I must admit that I took a few attempts to get going with the book . I feel that the concept and storyline could make for interesting discussions . Not an easy read

This was recommended to me as a good book club read that would provoke an interesting discussion, so I took the plunge and chose it as our read for January.  The group met last week and well let's just say you can't will them all, well not even 2 or 3 as it turns out.  I was somewhat wary of picking it as it was nearly £10.00 to buy as a hardback and at the time all the library copies were on loan but I went ahead anyway.
The book's premise held such promise, intrigue and ultimately something very different which is predominantly why I went with it.  As a group we'd never read anything like that, picking considerably safer choices, so this was really out of all our comfort zones.
You only really get a small taste of what the book is about from the blurb, in this world the women hold all the physical power and therefore times and circumstance are very different.  Men are on curfew, allowed out only with a female sponsor, women are taking over the world and nothing now can stop them.  Stop and think for a minute, if this could actually happen, how would you react differently in your day to day life?  Would you go out and beat up and rape men just because you could?  It is complete role reversal! It's a struggle for women in reality and it's still a struggle for women in this fictionalised world where they have all the power.
There were some really interesting points raised in this book and my ramblings are just that, incoherence at its finest I'm afraid.  I just can't get my head round this book at all.  I didn't really like it that much, and neither did my group, I didn't like one of the violent scenes and felt the author could have made her point just as clearly without it.  Thinking about it now, the only bits that stick in my mind are the negative parts, it was brutal and cruel and I haven't come away from it with any positivity.
The ending was also confusing and a bit rushed, it read like the author had had this amazing idea, wrote what she could but then struggled to finish it within a word count - hence the letters scenario at the start and end.  Some of the group members mentioned they thought this was a targeted YA read and would younger people question these kinds of things or just lap up the violence and girls running the world (I think they should give them more credit but hey ho).
I could ramble on some more but I've had enough now, definitely one of those books you need to have a chat with someone after though, even just to try and detangle everything in your head.  Overall, this is one of those books that you have to read and decide for yourself because everyone will have different thoughts and feelings about its content and outcome.  Final word - bizarre!