Allie takes advantage of this belief and baptizes some of the girls under a new religion, which holds that God is a woman and which focuses on the female figures in each religion (such as Mary, rather than Jesus).

They believe that a divine being is speaking to her. The first is using her power to cure a girl’s epilepsy, though the nuns in the convent don’t realize that she is using her power to do so. At the convent, Allie practices controlling her power and starts to perform a series of miracles. Spurred again by the voice, she runs away from home and ends up in a convent in South Carolina, where she tells them her name is Eve. Montgomery-Taylor, frequently beats and rapes her, and one day while this is occurring, a voice in her head compels her to kill her father using the power. Margot realizes how this power “is a kind of wealth” she becomes more and more blunt with Daniel as she thinks about how easily she could kill him.įourteen-year-old Allie has also discovered that she has the power. Within a month, the program is underway, and people also start to suggest Margot run for something more ambitious. Daniel, the governor of the state, is furious with her for going over his head, but Margot starts getting calls in support of the idea. Margot holds a press conference proposing training camps where girls can learn to use their powers more safely. When Margot asks Jocelyn to shock her, the power is awakened in Margot as well. Margot learns that her daughter, Jocelyn, has it. She learns that only girls seem to have it, and that it comes from a newly developed muscle called a skein. Margot, the mayor of an unnamed city in New England, is trying to learn about the power. Tunde doesn’t understand what has happened-he is both aroused by and afraid of this shock-so he films more women as they use this power, selling the footage to various news networks around the world. Twenty-one-year old Tunde, who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, has his first experience with the power when he play-wrestles with a girl he likes named Enuma, who shocks him.

Roxy’s father, a drug kingpin named Bernie Monke, gets revenge on the two men (though Roxy’s older brother Terry is killed in the fight), and Roxy uses her power to kill Primrose, the leader of their gang. Though she is able to hurt the men with this power, it is not enough to stop them from knocking Roxy unconscious and murdering her mother.

Roxy tries to fight the men and discovers that she can produce an electrostatic shock using only her hands. Two men break into fourteen-year-old Roxy’s home in London while she and Roxy’s mother are inside. The Power is introduced with a letter: author Neil Adam Armon writes a letter to fellow author Naomi Alderman, thanking her profusely for reading his book, explaining that it is “not quite history, not quite a novel.” What follows is the novel’s text.

Naomi alderman's the power