The Power
Women develop the ability to produce electrical jolts, and civilization inverts. Alderman's speculative fiction is mercilessly rigorous about how power corrupts regardless of who wields it, making the book more feminist critique than fantasy wish-fulfillment. The premise is the argument.
Reviewers who liked everything before the ending single out the final stretch as the weakest part, calling it a gesture at big ideas without a clear resolution, and comparing the whole book to “a classic half-hour Twilight Zone episode” stretched past its natural length. Several find the four leads thin, one noting “a lot of the POVs felt redundant at best”. A cluster of readers reject the pace too, with one writing that “the writing was blah and the book was sloooooooow as molasses” through the middle stretch. A smaller group treat the book's central argument, that power corrupts whoever holds it, as asserted rather than earned, and a critic notes the world “doesn't quite make sense on a world-building level”.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
