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A review by cardboardcat
The Power by Naomi Alderman
medium-paced
4.25
I have to say this is a fantastic read if you stick with it long enough to realize where it's going. The whole thing is pretty well-written, but the idea -- "what if women had powers" -- isn't anything special, and doesn't seem like it's going anywhere particularly interesting until you get about two-thirds of the way through. I'll write a few more comments under a spoiler tag:
"What if women ruled the world" is a tricky and often tired concept in fiction. You either have to set the story in an alternate universe where humanity progressed in a completely different way to how it actually did, or set it so far in the future that it's impossible to compare to the world we know. This novel handled that issue spectacularly. Usually these stories about worlds run by women rely primarily on taking common misogynistic cliches and reversing them (e.g., "Throughout history men writers were forced to write under women's names!" "Societies used to perform genital mutilation on male babies! Can you imagine if they did that to women?!"). This is funny at first but gets boring pretty quickly. I appreciate how this only has a few pages of that in the correspondences at the beginning and end.
Similarly, a lot of stories about a world run by women perpetuate the idea that a society run by women would inherently be better or kinder than one run by men. I find that idea to be gender-essentialist and frankly unrealistic. I like the way this was handled here.
"What if women ruled the world" is a tricky and often tired concept in fiction. You either have to set the story in an alternate universe where humanity progressed in a completely different way to how it actually did, or set it so far in the future that it's impossible to compare to the world we know. This novel handled that issue spectacularly. Usually these stories about worlds run by women rely primarily on taking common misogynistic cliches and reversing them (e.g., "Throughout history men writers were forced to write under women's names!" "Societies used to perform genital mutilation on male babies! Can you imagine if they did that to women?!"). This is funny at first but gets boring pretty quickly. I appreciate how this only has a few pages of that in the correspondences at the beginning and end.
Similarly, a lot of stories about a world run by women perpetuate the idea that a society run by women would inherently be better or kinder than one run by men. I find that idea to be gender-essentialist and frankly unrealistic. I like the way this was handled here.