And Tunde, a young Nigerian journalist and the only man in our central cast, chronicles the power as it emerges across the world: the protests and the riots and the men’s rights movements. Roxy, soon enough, becomes Mother Eve’s right-hand woman.Įlsewhere, Margot, the middle-aged mayor of an American city, uses her power and the political capital that comes with it to launch a trajectory toward the White House. She uses it to kill her foster father and then establish a new identity as the cult figure Mother Eve at the center of a new matriarchal religion. Allie is an abused foster child in the southern US who specializes, when her power comes, in control. Her power comes in strong and muscular, turning her into a sort of Lancelot figure, and she uses it to rise through the ranks of her father’s organization and avenge her mother’s murder. Roxy is the daughter of a London crime boss whose mother is murdered in front of her in the first chapter. She builds her narrative around four main characters, all of whom show us what the power looks like in action in different corners of the world. It’s as though Alderman cannot imagine critiquing our current patriarchal system of gender without erasing trans people from the world, which is one of the fundamental failures of this novel.īut in other aspects, Alderman’s worldbuilding is admirably comprehensive.

And while Alderman explores some of the complications of this development with a minor character who is intersex, at no point does she look at what it would mean for the trans community. Alderman’s power only affects people with two X chromosomes. What if every woman were to suddenly develop the ability to emit electric shocks out of her hands, like an electric eel?

The central premise of The Power is so simple as to be electrifying. This first half of The Power works through intense defamiliarization Here’s how those two stories fit together, and why the effect is so devastating. Instead, The Power becomes about, well, power: about the threat of violence that undergirds all human interactions, about what we do with power, and about the ways in which power corrupts. As the account we are reading becomes increasingly brutal, it stops being a classic women’s empowerment fantasy.

One of them is an empowerment fantasy, a revenge fantasy: What would happen if women didn’t have to be afraid of men anymore? What would happen if men stopped being a physical threat to women? What would you do? How would your life change?įor the first half of The Power, it seems as though that’s the story Alderman is interested in telling.īut in the second half, The Power changes. There are two stories curled up inside of Naomi Alderman’s The Power, the Vox Book Club’s March pick. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.

The power review naomi alderman