The Power

It was almost a 5 star book. The premise is fantastic. What if females, through what may be an environmentally triggered mutation, suddenly have a physical power making them the more dangerous sex? What if we weren't the vulnerable ones? Put that power in people who have been kept down, raped, forbidden to drive, passed over, and see what happens.

The change in religion is certainly brilliant, and the maneuvering for power, but some of the plot just doesn't work. The ages of the characters - Allie starts as 16 and ends as 26, Roxy 14 to 24 - is just too young to take control of all that they do. Is it possible? Sure, but it isn't written in a way that makes me have confidence in the characters' non-electrical abilities.

At times the writing was insightful - for some reason I really enjoy the paragraph (p. 245 in my edition) where Margot is describing Tunde's reporting, describing his body, asking how she can take him seriously with that body shown off, and getting horny. Yes, men are like this, and if women had the upper hand, well, it's quite foreseeable that we, too, would be dismissive of the opposite sex even while tolerating them.

I think it was the Roxy-Darrell event at the end that made it unbelievable for me. I think the concept was brilliant. I also think the author should have taken another year to write the book, because then it would have been a classic. Instead, she's put it out there early, and someone else will write the story that really does the concept justice.

Very interesting at first but it gets a bit stale in the middle

Didn't finish

I really liked the way this book was structured. It really messes with your head seeing societal norms upside down.

This one is so vivid and suspenseful (sometimes brutal) and poetic in places. You root for everyone and no one - all the characters are a little great and a little awful in different measures that shift through the story which I found super engaging. Really made me think and feel it.

Although I appreciated the concept for this book, the characters did not have depth and the story was not that interesting to me. The plot was two dimensional and didn’t have a unique outcome. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely - ho hum.