The Power by Naomi Alderman

One day there'll be a place for the women to live freely.

All over the world women are discovering they have the power.
With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain - even death.
Suddenly, every man on the planet finds they've lost control.
The Day of The Girls has arrived - but where will it end?

I picked this gem up in Waterstones and what drew me to it me was the idea of a world where the patriarchy disappears and men have no say in its return. This is the story of four lives in separate parts of the world that come together to help the people of Earth adapt to the new rulebook: where women have the final say.

The Main Plot:

With this story, Naomi Alderman holds a giant mirror to our society and how the genders treat one another. Buckle up 'cause things get real. Trigger warning: SA and rape.

We begin with four normal lives in different parts of the world: Roxy, a teenage girl in Britain. Tunde, a young man from Nigeria. Margot, a mayor in America, and Allie, a teenage girl in a separate part of America.

Roxy's story begins with her finding her power when her house is attacked by two male thugs who thought they could easily take two women but find more than they bargained for when Roxy floods their bodies with electricity. Unfortunately her mother is killed by the men. Coming from a rough family, Roxy is encouraged by her mob-boss father to go after the men and their leader and kill them all, which she does when she learns just how much power she seems to contain.

Tunde is an average Nigerian guy who has his first experience with The Power when a crush on a girl leads her to accidentally shocking him. A day later, he videos another woman shocking a man abusing her in a market and sells the footage to the news for a pretty penny. This starts him off on a long journey documenting the women of the world discovering their power and using it to break from the bonds of their male oppressors.

Mayor Margot Cleary has a teenage daughter who's been discovered to have The Power, who uses it to awaken it in Margot. At first it was thought to only be a power in young girls, but it turns out they can spark it in older women too. The same cannot be said for men. Margot has to delicately balance her responsibility to her family and her aspirations to govern wider parts of the country. Using clever tactics she manages to swing the voters to fund NorthStar camps for girls with The Power to be able to train with one another and learn to use their power more effectively.

Finally we have Allie who escapes a foster family with a man who sexually abuses her. She has known of her power for a while but hasn't used it due to an inner voice. One night her foster father is once again raping her when the guiding voice in her head gives Allie the green light; she shocks him hard enough to leave her body and then puts more volts through his head before she runs away, killing him. She flees to a convent and tells the nuns there her name is Eve. The inner voice guides her along the way and she finds girls and women following her and starting a new religion based on Christian teachings but instead of looking to the son, Mother Eve - as she becomes known as - tells her followers to learn from Mother Mary. 

God is a woman and she doesn't want you to change your religion, only to look at the mother, not the son. Look to Mary, not Jesus. Look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Look to Tara, not Buddha.

The world slowly descends into chaos as the men of the world deal with the aftermath of the patriarchy being totally, completely flipped on its head and having no way of stopping it. Fully at the mercy of women who are breaking free from the mysognistic ways of the old world, men go to dangerous and outright crazy tactics to try and keep themselves safe. The women finally have the ball in their court and soon the men find themselves in the same position women were only weeks ago: afraid, under control and fearful. Men suddenly have curfews in order to stay safe at night. They are raped and then asked if they provoked the woman somehow. They are told not to leave the house without a female guardian to speak for them, they are not allowed to vote and they are not allowed to drive or congregate in groups larger than three - does any of this sound familiar to you?

Presidents are assassinated, world leaders are under pressure and global affairs are growing more tense by the day. Extremist male groups want to use nuclear weapons on the world because men have altogether lost control (which sounds realistic from what I've seen and heard from some male leaders). The four lives we follow give the reader a 360° point of view of the new world and what's happening within it.

The Pros and The Cons:

➕ I can't say the circumstances of the world post-power were optimal - I personally wouldn't want men fearing to walk outside after sunset, as I do. I wouldn't want men being stalked or raped or murdered just for being seen as a easy target, as I am. I wouldn't want that inequality, but I do understand the reasons Roxy and Allie (and lots of women in the story) acted the way they did and I understand the anger behind their actions. The carnage, the blood, the chaos - it all came from years and a history of systematic abuse. Who wouldn't take revenge on their abuser if given a golden opportunity? The book wasn't about building a perfect world once women could escape the underside of the patriarchy's thumb, it was about a likely scenario in what would happen if women did one day wake with this 'get out of jail' card. It felt realistic to me that the only way women could send a message was lighting the world on fire.

'A wave of spray from the oceans feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.'

➖ I didn't understand the letters between Neil and Naomi at the beginning of the book. I thought they might have been letters to the editor or something, it wasn't clear. They only continued at the very end and I realised they were an interesting device that reminded the reader's how ridiculous the inequality of the genders is; Neil having to publish a work of fiction under a woman's name just to get it more press and to be taken seriously? Why should Neil be taken any less seriously for being a man? Because, in this universe men are what women are in this universe. They're looked down on, not taken seriously and pushed to the side all too often simply for being a woman. So hats off to this extra little something in the book that had me smiling and scoffing at the absurdity of the reality of both that world and ours, but I do wish it hadn't taken me until the end of the book to understand it.

➕ I loved following the four lives of Roxy, Tunde, Margot and Allie. They all had beginnings in our regular world where women stand as they do, and when The Power comes into their lives they decide to deal with it in their own ways and each have their own ending, despite all meeting and coming together at one point in the book. It was interesting to see how each of their backgrounds and the consequences of this new world influenced their decisions.

➕ I loved the way that the gender roles were so perfectly flipped in this novel. The way men and women are treated in the book truly highlighted how horribly women are treated in our present time, it was flawlessly written. Here are some of my favourite reversal quotes that got me rolling my eyes or chuckling:

'Men say that if all men in the world had (The Power women now have) everything would be back to the way it ought to be. They're angry and afraid.'

'Now they will know,' shouts a woman into Tunde's camera, 'that they are the ones who should not walk out of their houses alone at night. They are the ones who should be afraid!'

'Now (women) will only keep the most genetically healthy of (men) alive. See, this is why God meant men to be the ones with the power. However bad we treat a woman - well, it's like a slave. He just needs her in a fit condition to carry a child.'

'We need laws now to protect men. We need curfews on women. We need men to stand up and be counted. We are being ruled by fags who worship women. We need to cut them down.'

'Just like a man,' she says. 'Does not know how to be silent, thinks we always want to hear what he has to say, always talking talking talking, interrupting his betters.'

➕ It was suggested to me that this story is so well written that it could be interchangeable with lots of unbalanced parts of our world; eat the rich, for example. If any minority group rose up after finding they had a power to do so, the story may turn out quite similarly, maybe even with the previous reigning group nuking the world to the beyond rather than changing things for the better of the all.

I'm going to give Naomi Alderman novel a 4\5! 🌟🌟🌟🌟✩

I think this is an important book to be circulating today; with the statistics on how many women are killed per week or abused at home (or on the street) growing ever higher, I would like to think that if someone who agrees with and contributes to the patriarchy read this book they would think twice about how they treat the ladies in their lives. It isn't realistic for change to happen out of fear that women will suddenly gain a supernatural power, but perhaps a respect may be born out of seeing the nasty reality flipped on them.

The patriarchy as a whole is one of those things that I've grown up with to the point that I thought it was normal until I stopped to think on it. It's a little nuts that one gender has basically weaponised itself into taking majority rule of a planet. Let that sink in for a moment. Following that, it feels right that the events in The Power unfolded the way they did; you can only push someone so far before they snap, and the women in this story - women-kind as a whole - were being pushed around, murdered, trafficked, tortured, controlled and dehumanised (as we are in this world). Of course they were pissed. Once they found they had The Power and could use it to turn the patriarchy to ashes, it's the first thing they did. Once they found they didn't have be under a man's dictatorship any logner they tore down anyone that would stand in their way of changing the world and I loved the thrill of reading their adventures and their choices.

That's not all for this week! Later on I will be posting a second review! 🤯 I was so busy last week visiting family that I didn't manage to get this published on my normal schedule, so watch out for this week's second review on The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewel!

All in all, I enjoyed this book so much. It was a tough read because the mirror that Naomi held up to our society didn't show me anything pretty, so it tended to leave a sour taste in my mouth every time I finished a chapter, but I certainly loved the thrill of reading the women fighting back against injustice and winning! It was fantastic.

Have you read this book before? How did you like it? Not read it? Will you be adding this to your TBR list? Let me know in the comments!

Love and Light,

Melissa

xoxo