This book is so good!
I had never heard of this book by Naomi Alderman until my book club elected to discuss it, at which point I got the audiobook from my library. It was available to borrow immediately and the narrator does a fantastic job, so I highly recommend listening to this one if you’re an audiobook person.
The concept of the book is that young women start developing the ability to shoot electricity out of their hands. At first, only teenagers and young women can do it, but it turns out they can teach older women how to do it as well. Of course that leads to the question of whether women have always had this ability, and if so, what was the catalyst that made this power suddenly available to them?
There are some theories, but they don’t matter as much as what happens after the women start developing this power.
The first girl to get the power is named Roxy and she lives in London. Her dad is a big-time crime boss, but her mother was his girlfriend, not his wife, so while Roxy is recognized as his daughter, she’s never really been welcomed into the family.
Roxy first develops the power (or at least realizes she has the power) when she and her mom are getting attacked by some thugs who were hired to kill her mom. They leave Roxy alive, but her mom doesn’t make it.
Another character the book follows is Allie, a 16-year-old orphan who is currently in an abusive foster home. She has a voice in her head that tells her when to do certain things, when to wait, and when there’s danger. She says the voice has never steered her wrong, so she pays attention when it speaks.
Allie has been playing around with her power for a while, so when her foster father is raping her, she asks the voice, “Now?” and after getting confirmation, Allie fries the guy’s brain and runs away.
She ends up at a convent that looks after young girls, many of whom have been orphans for a long time, like Allie. Others were kicked out of their homes when they developed their power and their families didn’t know what to do with them.
Allie starts preaching that God is neither male nor female, so although she took the male form in Christianity for a while, it’s time for her to take the female form. She uses stories from the Bible to back up her assertions. For example, she points out that, because parents are the ones who bear children and raise them, parents are more powerful than their children, which makes Mother Mary more powerful than Jesus. She claims that God has sent them this power because she is ready for women to take their rightful place in the world.
Allie changes her name to Mother Eve and starts preaching a matriarchal religion that is heavily based in Christianity, so it’s not totally new, but it is very different from the versions of Christianity most of us know today.
Margot is the mayor of an unnamed city trying to deal with the political ramifications of the oppressed gender suddenly coming into this new power and scaring the pants off all the men who are afraid of women having any power whatsoever.
It also results in real problems with girls using the power in school and on the playground, either intentionally or because they don’t know how to control it. At first, the politicians think it’s temporary and it will resolve itself after a while, but of course that’s not the case.
Margot’s older daughter, Jocelyn, gets into trouble because she badly shocked a boy at school. It makes the news because Margot is the mayor and the family of the boy gives interviews saying how traumatized he is.
When Margot asks Jocelyn to show her what the power is like, Jocelyn fires a small jolt into Margot’s hand and suddenly Margot has the power.
Then they start requiring that every woman who works in government get tested for the power and be banned from working in government. Margot takes the test, which gives her a series of small shocks to try to compel her to release her own electricity. All Margot has to do is resist the urge to release a shock of her own and everyone thinks she’s in the clear.
She ends up outing herself when she loses her cool during a debate with her opponent for governor, but rather than ending her career, it turns out to be just the start. The people see her as powerful, vote her into office and she moves quickly upward from there.
One of her initiatives is to start a camp called North Star where young girls can go to learn to control their power. Jocelyn attends one of the camps, and while her power is never reliable, (either she releases a ton of electricity, or none at all), the camp does help her to control it so she doesn’t have to release a ton of electricity when she doesn’t want to.
Tunde is a man in Nigeria who gets the idea to use his cell phone to take video of women using their power in public. He starts by posting his video online, then gets an email from a news outlet offering to buy the video from him, and that starts his journalism career. He decides it’s his mission to document the changes happening around the world as a result of this new-found power, and eventually he’s going to write a massive book about it all.
I think most of the book goes along pretty much the way you would expect it to. Women realize they have a power men don’t have, which means they no longer have to tolerate the oppression and abuse that has become normalized over millennia of oppression and abuse. They rise up and our heroes get swept up in it all.
Then the book takes a turn and women start subjecting men. A law is passed in one country that men need a female guardian to sign their passport, to escort them at night, with the rationalization that it’s for their own protection. Sound familiar?
The book is bookended by correspondence between two writers (historians?), a man and a woman living 5,000 years in the future. The concept is that the book has been written by the man and he’s asking the woman for her feedback.
She insists she likes it, but after 5,000 the gender roles have been so thoroughly reversed and entrenched that the woman finds it hard to believe that women are not naturally strong and assertive and men are not naturally caring and nurturing. She believes male soldiers from history to have been the exception, rather than the norm and she backs up her theory with evolutionary psychology, which she claims favored strong women because they had to protect their children and nurturing men to take care of the home. I thought it was such a brilliant way to reveal the arguments used in favor of our current gender dynamics as nothing more than rationalizations for sexism, and the final line of this book was *chef’s kiss*
I saw some criticisms online that the role reversal of women oppressing men feeds into the narrative that if women are allowed to be treated as equals, they’ll take over and oppress men, and I have to admit that was my initial reaction to the extreme violence against men when they first started to appear in the book, but the more I think about it, the less I think that’s what Alderman is doing, because this book is not about equality.
This book is as much about power as it is about gender dynamics. It’s about the nature of power and what it does to people. What happens when one group has some sort of advantage over another group?
The situation in this book is not gender equality. It’s one gender developing an advantage over the other, and as I mentioned above, by flipping the gender dynamics, Alderman is making a commentary on our current gender dynamics and the fact that there is no rational reason for any of it. It’s all comes down to power — who has it, and what they do with it.
Brilliant. I loved everything about this book.