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Summary
Summary
In this stunning bestseller praised as "our era's Handmaid's Tale ," a fierce new power has emerged--and only women have it ( Washington Post ).
In The Power , the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family.
But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets. From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, The Power is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.
"Captivating, fierce, and unsettling...I was riveted by every page. Alderman's prose is immersive and, well, electric." -- New York Times Book Review
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Alderman's science fiction novel, set all over the world, was awarded the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Sometime in the near future, young women discover they have within them the ability to unleash skeins of electrical current that can maim and kill. One of them, an abused American foster child, joins a group of nuns, reinventing herself as the healer Mother Eve. She promotes a new religion in which Jews look to Miriam, Muslims to Fatimah, Christians to Mary. Her ally is an English crime lord's daughter named Roxy, whose skein is warrior strong, and whose violent family has global connections. Meanwhile Tunde, an opportunistic photojournalist, manages to break the news of several women's revolts across the world. The first upheavals are in Saudi Arabia and Moldova, places where women have few rights. But the woman who rules Bessapara, the first nation of the new world order, is unscrupulous and afraid, and she creates further instability by stripping men in her country of all rights and implicitly threatening world war. Roxy runs into trouble trying to keep a lid on this international situation, while Mother Eve convinces herself it might be for the best to start the world anew. Margot, an American politician taught to tap into her skein by her daughter, rises to power in the States, her message becoming more hawkish as she gains influence. But she is corrupted by her addiction to power over her male rivals, and she, too, plays a part in the endgame. Alderman tests her female characters by giving them power, and they all abuse it. Readers should not expect easy answers in this dystopian novel, but Alderman succeeds in crafting a stirring and mind-bending vision. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Alderman's (The Liar's Gospel, 2013) sublime new novel posits a game-changing question: What if women suddenly manifested an electrical charge that they could control and use as a weapon? This new female power, the origins of which are attributed to a WWII chemical experiment, first becomes evident in teenage girls around the world in the present time. Roxy, the daughter of an English mobster, attacks the men who have come to kill her mother, while in America, foster-child Allie finds she has the ability to fight off her lecherous foster father. Teenage girls can somehow awaken the power in older women, as Margot, an American politician, learns when her daughter injures a boy in a fight. And in Nigeria, Tunde's journalism career is launched when he observes a girl using her power on another boy. Alderman wrestles with some heady questions: What happens when the balance of power shifts? Would women be kinder, gentler rulers, or would they be just as ruthless as their male counterparts? That Alderman is able to explore these provocative themes in a novel that is both wildly entertaining and utterly absorbing makes for an instant classic, bound to elicit discussion and admiration in equal measure.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
During the early 21st century, women develop an electrical power that is expelled from their fingers and can be used to shock or kill. As the Power spreads, it ushers in a new religious and political order run by strongwomen, ending with a worldwide war between the sexes. Historical documents from the Cataclysm era interrupt the novel to signal that we are reading about the past. The framework suggests comparison to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which is unfortunate because while Alderman's (Disobedience) book won the Bailey's Women's Prize, it fails on multiple levels. There's a flimsy explanation of how women got the Power (from a liquid introduced into water systems during World War II to protect against nerve gas, but then why are only females affected?), and the worldbuilding is just as bad. It turns out that it isn't possible to create a believable world from a pastiche of Facebook feeds and Reddit threads, and in any case we need some evidence that misogyny is a worldwide problem and not just a personal one. Pre-Power women's victimization is generalized and in some cases assumed (Muslim women are oppressed), and however tragic, the backstories crafted for the strongwomen are poorly imagined and serve only to justify war crimes and transnational drug dealing during the revolution. The narrative abounds with stock characters such as the ambitious woman, the victim, the misogynist Middle Eastern king, and a good guy with a camera, and almost everyone is a background player to Allie and Roxy, the architects of the Cataclysm. There's also hard-charging female politician Margo, a set piece going nowhere. With Margo, we have to fill in the blanks ourselves; we know she's ambitious, for instance, because she let her husband raise the kids. In the end, by focusing on the few and most violent women to make her point, the author ignores the complicated nature of power. Societies fail through the daily capitulation to power and privilege, to self-serving silence and the abdication of individual agency, which is what makes The Handmaid's Tale so powerful and so relevant. Verdict Ripped from the headlines but lacking in verisimilitude, this is a book about power through a narrow lens. Readers will be talking about it, but it is not recommended.-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.