The Power - Naomi Alderman

"In The Power the world is a recognisable place: there's a rich Nigerian kid who lounges around the family pool; a foster girl whose religious parents hide their true nature; a local American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But something vital has changed, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power - they can cause agonising pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world changes utterly.

This extraordinary novel by Naomi Alderman, a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and Granta Best of British writer, is not only a gripping story of how the world would change if power was in the hands of women but also exposes, with breath-taking daring, our contemporary world."

Ooh, this is a toughie. I have a lot of mixed feelings about Alderman's The Power. It's an intriguing and clever concept, but this never really translates into an engaging story.

Imagine if one day, suddenly, girls developed a strange physical power: they can produce electricity inside them. They can use this power to hurt, to torture, and to kill. A world that is built on patriarchy is suddenly upturned - being a woman is synonymous with power and strength, men are the ones afraid to walk alone at night, the female body itself becomes an instrument of power.

With obvious nods to rape culture, The Power imagines what the world would be like if men, not women, had to live in constant fear for their physical safety. Alderman considers how this would affect a variety of people and issues, from terrorism to religion, and she does this through the eyes of four very different people.

There's Roxy, a white British teenager and the daughter of a gangster. There's Allie, a mixed-race girl who runs away after years of abuse and finds herself at a convent, revered as some kind of goddess. There's Margot, an American mayor and one of the few older women to develop the power. And then Tunde, a young Nigerian man and aspiring journalist who captures early footage of the power in action.

The four perspectives are unequal and uneven, with certain perspectives being much more interesting for part of the book and then becoming tedious, and others doing the reverse of that. Some of the characters verge on cliches and stereotypes too.

I felt like most of the book explored a concept without telling a story. After the initial discovery of the powers and the subsequent affect on the world, the book kind of stalled, and lots of chapters felt dragged out without purpose or direction. Allie's perspective became deeply entrenched in religion, more so than was interesting, and I quickly lost interest in where the other POVs were going.

Also, some parts seemed a little too simplistic. I honestly don't believe that Saudi women would embrace rebellion so readily and to that extent. The notion that Muslim women are just waiting to throw off their clothes, riot in the street, and have casual sex seems like a blinkered "Western" perspective. Sure, maybe this would evolve over time if Saudi women had power, but I find it very hard to believe that anyone would cast off centuries of cultural practices in a matter of days.

Social norms throughout the world shift daily as more and more young women discover their ability to harness the power. Some social adjustments are small and happen slowly; others are more drastic and arrive suddenly. Males must behave in ways that are unorthodox for men but are, in the real world, common practice for women. It often feels unfathomable that male characters in the book should suffer such atrocities, but readers are forced to recognize a disturbing fact: Women suffer similar acts of barbarism every day in the real world.

The Power is a real mixed bag full of fascinating ideas, lack of focus, over-simplified male/female power dynamics, and some clever subversive scenes. I particularly liked the part where one woman claims that some boys "secretly like it", a play on the notion of "asking for it" in rape culture.

A hard book to rate. I wonder if it would have made a better short story. 

Age Rating 15+. Quite brutal rape and war/death scenes.