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Emma Watson recommended The Power in Books (curated)

 
The Power
The Power
Naomi Alderman | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry
7.9 (13 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"Alderman challenges the cliché that women are more noble than men, and that a world run by women would be more gentle, with benevolent leaders and no war. In fact, women become power hungry and begin to repress men. They commit war atrocities, perform male genital mutilation, rape and maim for sport and kill to occupy land. With power dynamics reversed, the women don’t choose a righteous path – they act no better than men who have abused power throughout history. I think Alderman’s point is that people who abuse, do so because they can."

Source
  
The Nowhere Girls
The Nowhere Girls
Amy Reed | 2017 | Children
10
9.8 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
Positive feminist book. (0 more)
Excellent book with an important theme.
The blurb;

Who are the Nowhere Girls? They’re every girl. But they start with just three:

Grace, the preacher’s daughter who unwittingly moved into the old house of a victim whose pain adorns the walls.

Bold Rosina, whose heart has become hardened by all of the straight girls who broke it.

And misunderstood Erin, the girl who finds more solace in science and order than she does in people.

They are brought together by the idea of changing the narrative of a girl they had never met, Lucy Moynihan, the victim of a sexual assault who was victimised further by people who found it easier to believe she had cried wolf than to confront what had really happened to her. A girl who, through the course of one evening, went from an excited teenager who felt wanted by a boy for the first time, to someone else entirely, with ‘a voice in the darkness, giving her a new name: Slut’.

Together, they form the Nowhere Girls, and decide to avenge the
rape of a girl none of them knew.

                          ~


I’m going to jump straight in with wow! This book packs a powerful punch.

The Nowhere Girls tackles rape culture, sexual assault, misogyny and victim blaming, and does it well.

At times it’s uncomfortable reading, but it’s realistic, the empowering feminist message is never patronising, and it does not take an All men are bad stance.

I love the diversity of the 3 main characters. Rosina is Mexican, and gay, Grace’s mum is a church pastor, run out her former church because of her outspoken, liberal views, and Erin has Aspergers, which I felt – as someone with two children with Autism- was well observed! Erin was my favourite character.

The Nowhere Girls shows what can happen when girls get together and support each other, even when they have different views on things. It shows, and gives hope, that by speaking up, by standing together, by raising one another up, we can begin to bring about change.

Amy Reed writes, at the end of the book, how the story was partly inspired by events in her town, owners of a coffee shop were called out by the people in the town, on their misogynistic behaviour, which included a graphic list of sexual conquests – including local women, posted online. They eventually left town in disgrace.

The excerpts from the (fictional) blog in the book, The real men of Prescott were difficult to read, mostly because there really are people who think this way.

This is taken from the blog….

Girls want to be taken; it’s in their natures, so sometimes they put up a fight hoping you’ll get a little rough. The truth is, sometimes no doesn’t mean no. Of course, the feminazis will never admit this, but I’ll bet you a hundred bucks most of those chicks like it rough.
We really do need to talk about rape culture, every girl needs to know that they can say no, at any point, that even if they are too drunk to consent it’s not their fault, it’s still rape, that even if they didn’t have the strength to fight it’s not their fault, it’s still rape, boys need to know this too.

There needs to be a change within society, rape culture is real, it’s happening, and it needs to stop. Any book that can start a conversation about this is a good thing, in my opinion, and with its raw honesty The Nowhere Girls is an emotional, hard hitting, important book.

Buzzfeed says the Nowhere Girls is

‘Empowering, brutally honest, and realistically complex’