Unpopular opinion over here! But I’m going to tell you right off the bat, I wasn’t a huge fan of The Power by Naomi Alderman. Before I dive into why, a huge shout for an A+ fantastic premise, the idea was brilliant — it was great concept! Girls begin developing a strange physical power: they can produce electricity inside them, and this fierce new gift shifts the power dynamics between genders. NEAT, RIGHT?! No. The execution of this book was a hot freaking mess. Let’s jump into why…
Great Potential, Weak Execution | The Power by Naomi Alderman
The Power has four main characters, three female, one male. Each of these four characters holds immense power (literally and physically for the women), our one and only main male character is a photo journalist. Each character is highly influential in changing the course of the world. There are a few other important players, but we don’t follow them as closely. There’s an argument to be made that there were a bit too many points of view with this book — especially since we get to meet so many secondary players. More importantly: the pacing and organization of respective sections made little logical sense.
I didn’t feel connected with any of the characters, pretty much everyone was unlikeable and un-relatable. I didn’t have much patience for the biblical talk of “Mother Eve” neither could I handle Roxy and her entire family. They felt like a really terrible version of The Godfather. Tunde had literally no personality whatsoever — he totally could have been cut out… The only one of our main characters I could stomach was Margot. But even then, it was confusing why the author chose to slowly push Margot’s teenage daughter into such a large role in the story — she added very little, in my opinion. Lastly, I couldn’t grasp why everyone wanted to go to Moldova to carry out their plans for world domination….
The story felt very scattered and unclear, it branched off in so many random directions.
The Power also implied that if women were the dominate gender, we would go totally wild. War, vandalism, terror, abuse, murder, rape… it got pretty intense. It really wasn’t the dystopian feminist novel we all thought it would be. If you’re looking for that, go read The Handmaid’s Tale.
I hate to say this, but from very early on (~100 pages in), this book felt like a total drag. I didn’t enjoy reading it in the slightest, mainly because of how bored I felt by this novel. The plot isn’t very compelling, and I had to force myself to pick it back up night after night. However I did power through (pun!) but I really hate that feeling of wishing a book would just freaking end already.
Oh, and lastly. I didn’t find the letters back and forth from Neil to Naomi to be as clever as everyone thought it was. If anything, it was super confusing until you get the very end of the book. Once processed, I gave it a heavy eye roll. Maybe that was just me?
I ended up giving it two-stars on Goodreads, mainly because of how bored and underwhelmed it left me.