The Power (Alderman)

The Power 
Naomi Alderman, 2016 (U.S., 2017)
Little, Brown and Company
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316547611


Summary
Winner, 2017 Baileys Women's Prize-Fiction

What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power?

In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family.

But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power—they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.

From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, The Power is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth— 1974
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University; University of East Anglia
• Awards—Orange Prize-New Writers; Baileys Women's Prize-Fiction
• Currently—lives in London, England


Naomi Alderman is an English author, novelist and game designer whose most recent novel, The Power, won the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Born in London, the daughter of Geoffrey Alderman, a specialist in Anglo-Jewish history, Naomi attended Lincoln College, Oxford, where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Following Oxford, she studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

From 2003-07, Alderman was the lead writer for Perplex City, an alternate reality game, at Mind Candy. She went on to become lead writer on the running video game Zombies, Run! which launched in 2012.

Since 2012, Alderman has been Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She continues to write a monthly technology column for The Guardian.

Novels
Alderman's literary debut came in 2006 with Disobedience, a well-received (if controversial) novel about a North London rabbi's lesbian daughter living in New York. The novel garnered her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers. Writing the book Alderman to reject her life as a practising Jew. "I went into the novel religious and by the end I wasn’t. I wrote myself out of it," she told Claire Armistead of The Guardian in 2016.

Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in 2010, and her third, The Liar's Gospel in 2012. That work portrays Jesus as an "inconsequential preacher," as described by Jewish Renaissance Magazine, which also referred to the novel as "uncomfortable and problematic."

Alderman's first three novels were all serialized on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime.

In 2016, Alderman published The Power, a dystopian novel about young women who develop the ability to deliver deadly electrical shocks and who misuse their new found power. The book won the 2017 Baileys Women Prize for Fiction.

Recognition
2006 - Orange Prize for New Writers
2007 - Sunday Times New Writer of the Year
2012 - Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative*
2013 - Granta's 20 Best Young Writers list
2017 - Baileys Women's Prize-Fiction

* The Initiative is an international philanthropic program which pairs, for one year, "masters" in a specific discipline with emerging talents. Margaret Atwood selected Alderman as her protege, and the result was Alderman's fourth novel, The Power, which she dedicated to Atwood. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/18/2018.)

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

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Power … then take off on our own:

1. The premise of The Power seems to be that if a new world order were created—with women in charge—it would look little different from the way it does now. That woman would use their power to oppress men. Do you agree with that premise? Does Naomi Alderman make her case convincingly? Do you see other possibilities?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: The book poses a question: why do people abuse power? What does the book suggest the answer is? What is your answer?

3. As an interesting exercise, go through the novel to identify those societal structures, both legitimate and criminal, that have been changed by feminine power. Look at how the book treats religion, the military, sex trafficking and porn, harassment, even bullying. What does the new power inversion say about the way gender and sexuality operates in "normal" society (i.e., today in the early 21st century)?

4. In what ways does each of the four characters—Eve, Roxy, Tunde, and Margot—illuminate the events of the novel and all that has changed? Whose perspective or story do you find most interesting … or revealing … or engaging?

5. What do you make of Neil Adam Armon and his gushing letter to Naomi Alderman, "I am so grateful you could spare the time," and "Sorry, I'll shut up now"? If you are a woman, does that tone, do those words, have a familiar ring? Also, what's the joke here about appropriation, given that Alderman's name, not Neil's, ends up on the novel? (If you haven't already, play around with the letters of Neil's name.)

6. Vogue reviewer, Bridget Read (really), calls parts of the book "revenge porn." Do you agree with her label? Do you find the revenge satisfying or twisted … or both?

7. Neil ponders: "Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: It's not there." What does Neil mean, and do you agree or disagree? How do you see gender? Is it "real" or a social construct?

8. The novel: bleak or hopeful?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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