Anyone read "The Power," by Naomi Alderman?

Just started on Amazon Prime. Im not expecting much

Yes. DH raved about it but I wasn't that sure.

Naomi Alderman didn't write Vox, it was Christina Dalcher.

Femlandia by Christina Dalcher is also very good, The Power is on my tbr bookcase

Yes, I preferred Vox.

I really loved it but agree the end wasn’t great. I also agree with a pp who said Vox by Christina Dalcher is better. That’s also a dystopic womens rights based book.

I really enjoyed this and just seen that it has been turned into a new TV series - out on Amazon Prime tomorrow which looks good too.

OP I totally agree with you - I thought the plot line of women suddenly taking over the world because they found they could spark fire from their hands through years of tolerating misogyny had SO MUCH promise and potential.

The individual stories were very weak and I did fell the moral was ‘what about the menz’ and ‘women can be as bad as men’. I was so, so disappointed.

I found it really gripping from start to finish! The only part I didn't like was the editorialising from the 'future,' it felt like she was trying too hard to hammer the message home. I liked that she didn't pull any punches when it came to the brutality; as pps have said it glaringly spotlighted how normalised male on female violence often is.

For those who liked the concept but who are after something a little gentler, I can recommend The End of Men by Hannah Rosin, and the film No Men Beyond this Point which is quirky and quite funny.

Dystopian fiction is favourite genre. I really enjoyed it.

Just to add, I much preferred Vox by the same author, which is also a dystopian novel.

Like many, I thought it was an interesting premise but I found the plot disappointing.
And I found the writing clumsy and, for me, too colloquial.

I didn't like it either. It was an interesting idea but I didn't like any of the characters or the writing really.

Well, the title couldn’t have been clearer! 😄

It’s been on my bookshelf for years after someone gave it to me. You’ve all made me want to read it!

Yeah, I guess I'm just not very interested in stories about power and who is manipulating who to get it. Somebody in my group said it reminded them of Game of Thrones!

Yes, we read it for my book group a few years ago. We all, bar none, hated it! Like you, we thought the blurb sounded promising and so many rave reviews too, but it was rubbish!

It’s been a while since I read it, but from memory the societal collapse was driven by a few individuals obtaining exceptional power from the chaos of the general overhaul of society’s rules, the gangster, the politician, and the Eve character particularly having the extra abilities of manipulating others.

So on one level this is what happens when the power balance swings, and on another, this is was obscene power does to people. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that.

The thing is though that's why I found it a bit weird that in the book it completely destroyed society and took them 4000 years to build it up again. Why would that suddenly happen if these are things that have been done to women? And most of it was in completely different context. They burned the genitals of the men as a kind of punishment for sexual assault, but FGM is/was done for reasons of prudery or cultural narratives about purity of women.

Nobody has ever operated on a man to remove something that makes him stronger and tried to place it in a woman as far as I know.

I don't know, it just felt very random, almost like the author didn't really understand the mechanisms behind male violence and assumed that was random so she made the female violence random too, and then the outcome of that was for society to collapse?

It would have been a more interesting read if the women were violent for reasons that made sense - some were - and to explore what that might lead to rather than just it leading to an apocalypse with no sense of why our how that happened.

I read it for a book group and liked it. It was so shocking to see men living in fear of women whereas that’s a daily reality in the present world. It made me think about how much male violence is accepted and expected, and how shocking it is when the roles are reversed.

The author commented that it was interesting that people called it a dystopian story, as all the things that women do to men in the book were/are currently being done by men to women and no one suggests we are living in a dystopia.

Margaret Atwood says there's nothing in the Handmaid's Tale which hasn't already happened somewhere in the world, too.

I thought it was brilliant. It wasn’t supposed to be, hooray! Women can get their own back on men and not be afraid! It was supposed to be a demonstration of how power corrupts.

The author commented that it was interesting that people called it a dystopian story, as all the things that women do to men in the book were/are currently being done by men to women and no one suggests we are living in a dystopia.

That is interesting, Easter.

I read it ages ago so can't remember the detail but what I found interesting was that it (in my head anyway) planted the idea that the reason women are kind and caring and the nuturers isnt because they are biologically programmed to be, but because they don't hold the balance of power. But give them the power and maybe they are just as likely to be violent, sadistic and power-hungry as men are historically - almost like saying the kindness is there through powerlessness/needing to placate/stay safe, rather than being an innate "goodness". I found that premise fascinating and that's stayed with me more than the story itself.