So the concept of this book was an interesting one to me. In short, a role reversal: what if women had the power instead of men? Power being quite literal. Imagine a parallel earth in the present day, but there's been a latent mutation that starts to manifest in young women in the form of electricity that can be shot from their hands. Older women can't generate it naturally but can use it if a young woman awakens it in them. This is our setting.

What happens is the unravelling of social order and the rise of women's rebellion across the globe, them taking the power. Are you seeing it? It's allegory. There are four main (and a couple of others off the top of my head) perspectives that act as the observers of the world. Beyond that, though, there's not much to say about them. They exist on linear axes without any clearly definable character development. This is disappointing and so the book misses out on some of its potential emotive beats: I didn't massively care for them a great deal.

What we do have, however is some very taught writing and an interesting concept. There's also a lot of violence (unsurprising) and hoo boy quite a bit of rape as well. When you remove the electrical powers and invert the genders, you're looking into the mirror of our world which makes the violence that much more bone-chilling. The allegory is cleverly told but it has, sad to say, not amazing characters. Overall, a good, but not great, book.

Spoiler

Bonus points for framing it as a fictional historical novel.