The Power
Naomi Alderman
2017, 341 pages
Fiction
In Naomi Alderman’s feminist dystopia, The Power, girls and women develop the ability to electrocute people with their hands. This, predictably, leads to significant changes to the balance of power in the world.
The reader experiences this evolution of this otherworld through the eyes of four main characters – Roxy, a tough British girl with a gangster father and a “skein” that no others match; Allie (Mother Eve), who takes advantage of the religious undertone of the new power to advance the position of girls and women; Tunde, a Nigerian journalist who gets as close as possible to various female uprisings taking place around the world; and Margo, a local politician who discovers that she can use her power to finally beat her male superiors in the race for higher – more powerful – positions.
In the current political and social climate, Alderman’s characters and plot lines are especially poignant and (I would surmise) scary to some demographics (ahem, those who identify as men).
Though, as the reader may take away, it doesn’t always matter who has the power, but how they use it that will decide the fate of the world and all of us living on it.
Nicole Schulze Concord Public Library
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