The Power by Naomi Alderman

In the not-too-distant future, young girls around the world develop the ability to send electricity through their fingertips. This charge can be as light as a static electric shock or strong enough to kill. It is soon discovered that girls can awaken this power in older women, and the world changes almost overnight. The Power follows the stories of four people living through this tumultuous time. Roxy, the daughter of an English mob boss, uses her power to fend off home invaders and soon becomes embroiled in the family business; Allie, an American teen, fights off her abusive foster father and runs away to a convent; Margot, an American politician, must hide her power as new laws make it illegal for women with the power to work in government; and Tunde a Nigerian journalist who travels the world recording and reporting on what he sees. As scientists look for answers, governments try to maintain the status quo and women take to the streets to overturn slights both personal and institutional. Vigilante groups rise up, riots break out around the globe, and women take by force the power that has often been denied and used against them.

The Power provokes its readers to question stereotypes, gender dynamics, and what it means to have power. But don’t expect Alderman to hand out easy answers; she is clearly more interested in sparking conversation and self-reflection, which she accomplishes with aplomb. This is a book that begs to be devoured, passed on to friends and acquaintances, and dissected and discussed at length.

-Portia Kapraun

Revival by Stephen King

One of the things I’ve always liked about Stephen King novels, is the suspension of disbelief they inevitably engender.  Pragmatic by nature, I’m the last one to throw spilled salt, or avoid cracks on the sidewalk. However, give me five hundred pages of a good King novel and I’m turning on the hallway lights, checking door locks, and just generally feeling a little creeped out (in the most pleasant of ways I assure you).  The power his books have over me lies, in large part, with his ability to create such fully-fleshed characters, women and men I can well imagine I have met, in line at the BMV, on a crowded bus, or at an extended family reunion.  Flawed, but decent folk, too much like the rest of us for me not to be invested in their well-being.  King’s newest novel, proves to be no exception to this.  The novel’s main character, Jamie Morton, opens the novel with a nostalgic look-back into his childhood, to a time when the catalyst to alluded horrors, his “fifth business” first entered his life.  The Reverend Charles Jacob and his charming family arrive in the small Maine town of Harlow in 1962, where they become fatefully intertwined with the Morton family, until a horrific tragedy drives them apart.  Jamie and Charles meet again, several times over the ensuing decades, with lasting effects on Jamie, both good and ill. In his fifties, Jamie, at last apprehending that the long-sought realization of Charlie’s obsession (the source and application of De Vermis, a “secret” electricity) may be more terrifying than miraculous.  The last 200 pages of this novel virtually read themselves.  A cross between a Mary Shelley gothic novel and a Bill Bryson memoir, Revival, is sure to go down as yet another King classic.