The Power by Naomi Alderman - Book Review

The Power - Naomi Alderman

Book Review

Bottom Line: 7.5/10

Genre: Speculative Fiction, Dystopian

Pages: 382

Year of Publication: 2017

Publisher: Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

Overview / Summary:

In The Power (2017), set during the 2010s-2020s, a curiously strange phenomenon has appeared that will remake and fundamentally change human society and the world. Women have discovered, through a slew of accidental encounters worldwide, that they now possess the ability to generate electric power and discharge it through their bodies. At first, these are treated as small, isolated and disconnected incidents, but in a short time, women around the world are waking up to the power in droves, beginning first with adolescents and teens, before it becomes apparent that middle aged and even elderly women can do so too. The implications for society loom large as the story views these changes through the eyes of four central characters: Roxy, the illegitimate daughter of an organized crime boss in the UK; Margot, an American mayor with political aspirations whose daughter is among the first identified with using the power; Allie, a mixed race orphan who endures terrible suffering in her childhood only to hear a powerful voice inside her she believes is the Mother God; and Tunde, a young man from Africa aspiring to be a world famous reporter and who realizes very early on that the story and resolution of the power, the struggles it generates, and its resulting conflicts, will be the greatest news story of his time and decides that he will be the one to chronicle it. However, as the characters and the world at large surge forward through the achingly slow burn through time, the changes soon engulf all of them and the world into soon-to-be warring factions, where the future of the world is at stake and all of humanity as we know lies precariously in the balance.

SPOILER WARNING

DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU WISH TO AVOID SPOILERS

Detailed review and critique:

Naomi Alderman is Margaret Atwood’s (The Handmaid’s Tale - 1985) hand-picked apprentice/disciple as a writer, and such an endorsement did much to give Alderman her exposure. The cover to the book itself (which has changed noticeably from the one it had pre-COVID) in current 2025 print, has Margaret Atwood’s word at the top of it, describing the novel as “Electrifying,” which as anyone with an eye for detail will notice doesn’t really say much about the book as it is the heart and centerpiece of the book itself: using electrical power or bioelectricity. The full quote that used to be on the cover during its initial run, includes far more of her words: “Electrifying! Shocking! It will knock your socks off! Then you’ll think twice, about everything.“ This is far more of a ringing endorsement and it’s unclear why the publishers decided it would be better to shorten such glowing praise to just a single word. The new covers also omit the seal saying, “One of President Obama’s favorite reads of 2017,” likely because of the divisiveness involving politics, the polarization of such politics, and the offput for certain potential readers (despite the novel obviously touching very explicitly on political climates, sexual and gender relations, and hotly contested areas of social debate and ideological stances). The seal for the New York Times’ Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017 remains however.

The cover of the book itself is interesting not only for those reasons, but because it also contains a misleading lie emblazoned at its bottom, whether the initial paperback cover of the current one. It reads, “A fierce power has emerged - and only women have it.“ The problem is that this is simply not true. There are men in the book who end up being able to use the power as well, just not as powerfully as the women (typically), such as with Margot’s daughter, Jocelyn, and her love interest for part of the book named Ryan. The book also does have speculation on and later the event happening, where surgical removal of the skein (the piece of the body women have enabling the electrical power to be generated and wielded) from women is undertaken to then transplant the organ into a male body, and this procedure as described in-book appears to be completely successful.

While the old adage remains, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” any publisher will tell you matter-of-factly, that contrary to such wisdom, people do in fact judge a book by its cover in deciding whether or not to buy it. So then we must ask, ‘why include such a deliberate lie, and on the cover no less?’ The answer is likely that this short sentence can tell readers what to expect from the book, what the story will ultimately be about, and the power dynamics between the sexes will be fundamentally changed as a result. In short, this is obviously a work of feminist literature, and, as anyone familiar with The Handmaid’s Tale and its author, it wouldn’t be right for Margaret Atwood’s personally chosen protégé to not engage in social critique, feminist and gender perspectives, as well as dystopian visions, which ultimately lead to tackling uncomfortable and provocative themes (which she of course does).

The book takes on a rather robust confrontation of several hot-button issues, such as politics, ideology, feminism, sexual relations, philosophy and religion. Unfortunately, Alderman focuses on Abrahamic and almost exclusively the Christian religion (although shies almost completely away from other world religions besides a few small acknowledgements). This focus on religion is almost exclusively seen through the character of Allie, who goes on to found her own Church and calls herself Mother Eve, reinterpreting the patriarchal bent of Christianity into a matriarchical one, while reimagining God as a She (though the character herself in public addresses acknowledges that God herself is beyond such gendered attributions, it’s clear she sees God as a feminine entity and as a woman).

CHARACTERS, REPRESENTATION, AND INTERPRETATIONS:

Coming Soon.

Margot

Tunde

Allie

Roxy

Where the book succeeds, and where it needs work

Coming Soon

critique from the lens of feminism

Coming soon.