The Power (Alderman) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
I was riveted by every page. Alderman's prose is immersive and, well, electric, and I felt a closed circuit humming between the book and me as I read.… I felt so hungry, reading this book, for a ball of lightning in my hand instead of keys between my knuckles on a long walk home at night. I felt hungry for the victory of these women…over those who would hurt them.
Amal El-Mohtar - New York Times Book Review


The Power is the stuff of superhero fiction.… What starts out as a fantasy of female empowerment deepens and darkens into an interrogation of power itself, its uses and abuses and what it does to the people who have it.… [Alderman's] breakout work.
Claire Armitstead - Guardian (UK)


Richly imagined, ambitious, and propulsively written.
Sophie Gilbert - Atlantic


The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid's Tale.
Cosmopolitan


Narratively complex, philosophically searching, and gorgeously rendered.
Lisa Shea - Elle


Sometimes lightning does strike the same place twice. Sometimes it strikes a whole bunch of times. In Orange Award winner Naomi Alderman's chilling The Power, women across the globe discover a sudden ability to harness their aggression by inflicting electric shocks through their fingertips. Fans of speculative fiction…about empowered youth will be struck by Alderman's speedy and thorough inhabitation of a world just different enough from ours to jolt the imagination. Mothers, lock up your boys.
Sloane Crosley - Vanity Fair


The Power doesn't necessarily hold the answers to what organizing principle we should rally around instead.… It does audaciously depict, however, the most extreme results of a movement that seeks rather than interrogates power: That if feminism has become a means for domination, it has lost its way.
Bridget Read - Vogue


Alderman tests her female characters by giving them power, and they all abuse it. Readers should not expect easy answers in this dystopian novel, but Alderman succeeds in crafting a stirring and mind-bending vision.
Publishers Weekly


A page-turning thriller and timely exploration of gender roles, censorship and repressive political regimes, The Power is a must-read for today's times. —Lauren Bufferd
BookPage


(Starred review.) [S]ublime…. That Alderman is able to explore…provocative themes in a novel that is both wildly entertaining and utterly absorbing makes for an instant classic, bound to elicit discussion and admiration in equal measure. — Kristine Huntley
Booklist


All over the world, teenage girls develop the ability to send an electric charge from the tips of their fingers.… [The novel asks] interesting questions about gender…. It's fast-paced, thrilling, and even funny. Very smart and very entertaining.
Kirkus Reviews