I bought this on a whim, mainly because the back cover blurb reminded me of a plotline I found particularly interesting in Strong Female Protagonist. In a nutshell, The Power is scifi, written from the point of a view of a male researcher far in the future that outlines a possible account of how society cataclysmically shifted from male dominated to female dominated. At some point in our early 21st century, a form of chemical poisoning awakens an ability in women to create power electric shocks, just like eels do. From this starting point, the book outlines how politics, religion and centuries of patriarchy create a perfect storm of mutually assured destruction between genders. While this feels when you read it much like a thriller, there's an undercurrent of bleakness, because the thesis of the book (if there is one) is that if women had physical power over men, they would inevitably dominate men the way men dominated them historically. That hits hard, especially considering the author is a woman. I'm not sure I want to believe that, but it did disturb me. The book is really worth reading even though I found some of it a bit too predictable and cliché. Still, not all scifi books make me think, not even most of them.
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