The Power by Naomi Alderman is something completely different to what I usually read, because it is completely different to what most of the world reads.
It is set in a world in which all the women have the power of being able to control electricity and men cannot. It’s a weird gender reversal. Men are placed in situations that many of women have experienced and the only way they think they can cope is to create a war. We learn all this through several different characters points of view, from all around the world, who cross paths in their attempt to survive “the change”. I really liked all the characters such as Tunde who was a journalist and Roxy who was from a really powerful crime family.
I found moments of the book – especially at the start- hard to read. Alderman went into a lot of detail when describing things that happen to all the different women in the story that cause the start of the revolution that is ‘The Power’. Alderman dealt with a lot of secrets that happen behind closed doors in our world that was quite graphic and upsetting to read about. But I know why she wrote about it, the acts needed to be shown in order to show why women needed a weapon to stand up for themselves and show that it was time to stop the bad treatment of women. Although even as all the unfair things stop happening to women they begin to happen to men and there still isn’t any equality. The control got inverted and now men aren’t safe.
It was an intriguing story with a lot of twists and turns as you grow to like all the characters but in my personal opinion the ending had too many unanswered questions that I would have loved to know after connecting with all the characters but the storyline was so interesting that the ending would have had to be out of this world in order to out do the intenseness of the main plot.
I do recommend reading this book it’s wonderful yet disturbing to see women strong and men weak but it’s a side we have never really seen before in society and if reminds us that no one can have all the power, it needs to be distributed evenly. That’s what makes this story inspiring and I will never forget what I have read in this book.
Joy x
