read by Adjoa Andoh
You've almost certainly heard one version or another of the
famous Margaret Atwood quote: "At core, men are afraid women will laugh at
them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them." What if women
weren't afraid of men's violence anymore? How would that change things? Naomi
Alderman, who
became
Margaret Atwood's protege in 2012, set out to answer that exact question
in The Power.
I started reading
The
Power last December
—but I deliberately stretched out reading it, and
ended up not finishing it until several days into the new year, so I’m counting
it as my first book of 2018. I was enthralled with it and kept wishing I was
reading it with someone so I’d have someone to talk about it with.
The whole idea of how the world would change if women were more physically
powerful than men
—if they didn’t fear men
—how women’s attitudes would change,
how they would speak differently, act differently
—what that would mean on an
individual level, to them, to families and religions and countries and regions
and cultures and the whole future
—I couldn't stop thinking about it.
One may wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to be
another gender. But *this* is about how it might be if people remained whatever
gender they were, but the whole power structure got changed—and that change
started within each individual woman, one woman at a time, until it became a
tsunami.
I can't say much more than that without spoiling the plot of
this very plot-driven book for you. It's not just plot-driven; the
characters, unreliable narrators all, were real and vivid and I couldn't stop
worrying about what was going to happen to each of them next (and what was
going to happen to the world when it did). But the plot, with all of its twists
and turns and peaks and troughs and frustrations and epiphanies, is definitely
the focus.
In short: everybody needs to read this book. Five stars.
