

Loading... The Powerby Naomi Alderman
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» 35 more Best Dystopias (106) Top Five Books of 2017 (118) Female Author (337) Books Read in 2017 (803) Books Read in 2019 (666) Overdue Podcast (138) Books Read in 2020 (2,925) Female Protagonist (691) SFFKit 2018 (6) Banging Book Club (25) ALA The Reading List (43) No current Talk conversations about this book. The premise was solid enough, but spelling out the satire explicitly felt a bit patronizing to the reader. Didn't care much for the characters, so when things started (very abruptly) to go downhill, I felt nothing. The world-building was fun, though, which made the book a breezy read. Too much Christian mythology for my taste. ( ![]() What a clever and entertaining book this is. Like a lot of great sci fi, it takes a very simple idea and runs with it brilliantly. I loved it. This needs to be a genre. I love seeing roles and expectations flipped on their head. The Power is imperfect and a bit of a slog in the middle, but still utterly worth it. “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely” wrote Lord Acton, a nineteenth century historian and this can be seen as the major theme of this imaginative, engrossing and dark novel. Much of the action takes place in a near future, but with the major difference that most women have now developed an internal electrical power that gives them the ability to overcome all men. Naomi Alderman’s riveting writing explores the consequences of how some women use this strength, not only on a personal, but also a political level as the world changes radically – or does it? The world that she depicts is in many ways still recognisable as our own, but with new controllers at the levers of power, but who appear to be driven by the same impulses as now. This leads to an unforgettable novel that calls into question our whole way of life and our beliefs. I really enjoyed the book. It mostly explores what power can do to you. Women start to develop the ability to send electricity out of their hands. The younger generation teaches the older generation how to do it. The power is used for both good and evil. Males become freaked out because they are losing power. The only thing I didn't like was the ending. And the way the only solution is to destroy the world and burn it all down.
Alderman [...] imagines our present moment — with our history, our wars, our gender politics — complicated by the sudden widespread manifestation of “electrostatic power” in women. Young girls wake up one morning with the ability to generate powerful electric shocks from their bodies, having developed specialized muscles — called “skeins” — at their collarbones, which they can flex to deliver anything from mild stings to lethal jolts of electricity. The power varies in its intensity but is almost uniform in its distribution to anyone with two X chromosomes, and women vary in their capacity to control and direct it, but the result is still a vast, systemic upheaval of gender dynamics across the globe. Alderman has written our era's "Handmaid's Tale," and, like Margaret Atwood's classic, "The Power" is one of those essential feminist works that terrifies and illuminates, enrages and encourages. The novel is constructed as a big, brash, page-turning, drug-running, globetrotting thriller, one in which people say things such as: “It’s only you I’ve blimmin come to find, isn’t it?” and “You wanna stand with me? Or you wanna stand against me?” But it’s also endlessly nuanced and thought-provoking, combining elegantly efficient prose with beautiful meditations on the metaphysics of power, possibility and change. Belongs to Publisher Series
Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - teenage girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death. With this single twist, the four lives at the heart of Naomi Alderman's extraordinary, visceral novel are utterly transformed. No library descriptions found.
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92 — Literature English {except North American} English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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