The Power

Wow. I did not anticipate this to be so... Chilling.

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Recommended: Yes. But you need to be ready for it.
For a look into power, for a painful clever parallel with lots of tongue-in-cheek moments, for something that will challenge your perceptions about society and your own patterns of thinking, for an unflinching story of a world in the midst of change

Thoughts:
I wasn't ready for this. I should have known better, but I went into this thinking "Oh, it'll be a fun fantasy read about how crazy the world is after women develop the power to create and control lightning!" Looking back, I don't know how I was so wrong, but I'm glad I was because this story blew me away when I least expected show more it.

There were many times I found myself laughing and having a hard time believing the characters' disbelief at a world ruled by men. Then I stopped cold when I realized that the characterizations within, despite showing some of the extreme possibilities, are still my current reality and possibilities that exist in this world. Genital mutilation? It exists. Abuse of power? It exists. One gender oppressed and smothered due to social perceptions? Definitely exists. And I can't even count how many cruel, immoral, and evil things are done in the name of some God or religion or aggressive insistence in the lack thereof.

You have to be ready for this book. I wasn't, and maybe it was better that way, because it hit me without warning like a punch to the gut, and the impact was all the greater for it. Here's your word of advice though, and your recommendation to immediately find a copy of this and a few hours to read. show less

I read this on a 6-hour plane ride and was so pulled in that I finished the entire thing later that night. The degree to which Naomi Alderman both makes both genders understand how much women have to protect and suppress themselves, both consciously and unconsciously, is mind-boggling. The fact that she does not envision a female-dominated world as the end-all/be-all is equally amazing. I was so immersed into this narrative and this world that I actually felt myself changing during the reading experience - I believed that the power dynamic had flipped in our own reality as I was reading (as cheesy as that sounds), and so I felt no qualms about man-spreading in my plane seat (woman-spreading?) as the fellow next to me tried to encroach show more upon my leg space. A small thing, certainly: but how often does a book you read actually mold your own reality in such a visceral way? Extraordinary. show less

Full disclosure: I had Friday night dinner with the author's father in August 1985. OK, I get that's not much of a disclosure, but I've never been able to say that about any other book I've read, so I thought I'd just throw it out there.

The Power is a delightfully subversive speculative novel. It works on its own terms both as a thriller and as a piece of classic sci-fi, forcing the reader (or at least this male reader) to consider prejudice, privilege and patriarchy without ever seeming worthy or didactic. I whizzed through this in a day, but I suspect it will stay with me a while longer. Brava.

It happens slowly, and then all at once. A few girls, in the throes of late puberty, develop a power. An electricity. They can awaken the power in other women, and soon it is everywhere. At first the men laugh it off, then soon the structure of the world is turned upside-down. But this is still our world (for now, at least) and men who feel entitled to power over women are not going to give it up without a fight.

This book is presented, kind of like World War Z, as a history book depicting a science-fictional version of our own time, from a viewpoint in the future. The women in this book are allowed to be as varied and complicated as men. Some are manipulative, and some are manipulated. They are U.S. Senators, and cult leaders, and show more mobsters, and warlords. My favorite thing about the book was the interplay between the ways the world changes completely and the ways it stays exactly the same. It's fascinating. The viewpoint of Tunde, a male Nigerian journalist traveling the world to document countries where women are rising up, is a straight-forward gender swap. Meanwhile, the viewpoint of Roxy, a tough young woman raised in a mostly-male London organized crime family, is essentially unchanged from what you might expect in our world.

This book is very well-thought out and completely unique, and I will be remembering it for a long, long time. Highly recommended, although be warned that some parts are very graphic - from too-familiar misogynist screeds in the dark parts of the internet (plausibly just copy-pasted from the real world) to unusual depictions of men being raped by women, like Game of Thrones gone topsy-turvy. show less

Hooooooooooly crap, y'all. This book is AMAZING. And seriously violent and triggery and, on many levels, a depressing meditation on the fact that humans are garbage. At the same time, however, it is absolutely cathartic; while it may very well trigger those who have had sexual assault and abuse experiences, I would encourage fellow survivors to read it anyway, because the process of the book creates an emotional and experiential arc that, in the end, is both horrifying and deeply, deeply satisfying.

Let's be clear: this is speculative fiction that looks toward the near future and is drawn straight from today's very real gender dynamics. In the book, teenage girls and women manifest the power to produce electricity in their bodies show more sufficient to electrocute -- you might imagine that such power turns society on its head, and it is that upheaval that the novel follows. It's also set up a book-within-a-book, with far future citizens looking back at what would be our near future and arguing amongst themselves about what's true in their history. That very set up creates enough distance to make even the more violent scenarios of the internal story fascinating in context.

A friend of mine told me that there are two camps of people who read this book: those who think it should be viewed purely as a meditation on the absolute corruption of power (which, on many levels, it definitely is) and those who finish the book with the phrase "Burn it all down" on their lips. I leave you to decide which camp you are in, but I'm telling you that you need to read this book. The very last line of the very last far-future letter puts the entire novel in perspective -- when you read it, it will hit you. Amazing. Seriously. show less

Really well-done speculative fiction, taking us into a world where women develop the power to send electrical shocks through their bodies. The power dynamics between men and women are reversed, and we see how that plays out over time. This book was challenging to read at times, because of the violence, and because it made me think.

Definitely recommended!

Décimo quinto livro do clube de leitura feminista da Emma Watson

Wow. Pensa numa distopia assustadora. Pensa que essa distopia só se dá como tal para leitores masculinos. Pensa que nós mulheres vivemos nessa distopia há milênios.
Numa narrativa ferina de cabo à rabo, Alderman traz um gender-bender com extremo pessimismo pela humanidade, ao mesmo tempo que as nuances irônicas, especialmente incisivas ao final do livro, destroem a "sabedoria" patriarcal.
No mais, seria um ótimo livro para ser lido por homens, já que eles têm tanta dificuldade de se identificar com personagens femininas, quem sabe numa distopia contra eles possam racionalizar um pouco de empatia, afinal o que acontece aos homens no livro ocorre com as mulheres show more todo dia há milhares de anos. show less