The Power by Rhonda Byrne Book Review: Love as a Force
The Power by Rhonda Byrne is a 272-page hardcover published on August 17, 2010 by Atria Books. It is the direct sequel to The Secret, and its argument is one specific claim: that love is a physical force running the universe, and that the law of attraction is really the law of love. Kevin Trudeau teaches a version of the same claim with very different machinery attached, and that comparison is why the book gets reviewed here. Read it if you want Byrne's fullest statement of why she thinks the mechanism works. Skip it if you want practice, because this book explains and almost never instructs.
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Of the three books in the core sequence, this is the theory volume. The New York Times and Newsweek both reviewed it by name in 2010, and neither was kind.
What The Power by Rhonda Byrne Actually Teaches
Byrne opens the book with a line from Alexander Graham Bell as her epigraph: "What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists." That is a fair warning label for what follows. The book names a force, describes what it does, and never tries to measure it.
The Central Claim: Love Is a Force
Rhonda Byrne's premise is that love is not an emotion but a physical force, and that it is the only positive force there is. She writes that nature's great powers, gravity and electromagnetism among them, are invisible to our senses while their power is not in doubt, and that the force of love is invisible in the same way and greater than any of them. Her phrasing is blunt on the point most readers get wrong: love is not weak, feeble or soft, in her words, it is the positive force of life. Imagine gravity with a preference and you have roughly the picture she is painting.
Take that as Rhonda Byrne's claim rather than as a finding. No physicist has described love as a force, and the analogy to gravity is doing all the work in the sentence. What the framing buys her is a way to talk about attraction without talking about thoughts, which is where The Secret spent its time.
Where the Power of Love Idea Came From
Rhonda Byrne did not invent the power of love as a cosmic principle, and does not pretend she did. The opening section carries an epigraph from Prentice Mulford, the nineteenth century New Thought writer, who described love as an element physically unseen but as real as air or water. That sentence is the seed of the whole book. Byrne's contribution is to describe a nineteenth century belief in modern language, which is precisely where scientists took issue with her.
The Law of Attraction, Renamed the Law of Love
Here is the move that makes this book different from its predecessor. Rhonda Byrne collapses two ideas into one and states it directly: the force of attraction is the force of love, attraction is love, and the law of attraction is the law of love. Everything else follows from that equivalence, which is why the phrase law of attraction appears less often here than it did in the first book. She has renamed her own mechanism.
The practical consequence is a rewritten definition of positive and negative. In Byrne's account your thoughts are positive when they are thoughts of what you want and love, and negative when they are thoughts of what you do not want and do not love. That is a cleaner test than the one The Secret offered, and it is the single most useful sentence in the book. Whether you accept the metaphysics or not, sorting your thinking by what you actually love is a real exercise. It also quietly changes what the law of attraction is supposed to be responding to: not the content of a thought, but your relationship to it.
Feelings Are the Readout, Not the Cause
Three of the twelve chapters are about feelings, and that ratio tells you where Rhonda Byrne puts the controls. Her position is that feelings report which frequency you are on at any moment, and that you cannot be on a frequency your feelings are not already telling you about. Good feelings mean you are giving out love. Bad feelings mean you are not, and the law of attraction responds accordingly. In her account the feelings are the instrument.
The operational rule is short. Your thoughts and feelings go out, and what you attract back matches them. Positive thoughts attract positive circumstances in her account, negative feelings attract the opposite, and there is no neutral gear. Nothing you receive arrives by accident. The book states that without qualification.
She applies Isaac Newton next, writing that every action of giving creates an opposite action of receiving, and that what you receive is always equal to what you have given. Newton's third law describes forces between physical bodies. Byrne treats it as an accounting rule for behavior. That step is not argued anywhere in the book, and it is where a scientifically minded reader will stop reading.
How The Power Is Organized
The library catalogue record for the 2010 first edition lists twelve chapters. They run: What Is The Power, The Power of Feelings, Feeling Frequencies, The Power and Creation, Feeling Is Creation, a chapter on your life being your own choice, Keys to Power, then applied chapters on money, relationships and health, and closing chapters on you and on life.
The shape is the same shape The Secret used. Front-load the theory, then run the single idea through the categories readers care about. Chapters one through seven are the book. The applied chapters restate what came before with different nouns in them. Two early chapter titles carry the word creation, Byrne's term for how the universe is supposed to deliver what you gave out.
The Points of Power Summaries
Each chapter closes with a block Byrne calls Points of Power, a bulleted restatement of what the chapter just argued. It is the most useful piece of design in the book. For the whole argument in an hour, read chapter one and then every Points of Power block in order.
The lines in those blocks are the book in miniature. Love is the cause of everything positive and good. Everything you want to be, do or have comes from love. Life does not happen to you, in her telling, you receive everything based on what you have given.
The Power at a Glance
| Detail | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Author | Rhonda Byrne, Australian, born 1951, former television producer |
| First published | August 17, 2010 |
| Publisher | Atria Books, first edition hardcover |
| Length | 272 pages |
| ISBN-13 | 9781439181782 |
| Place in the series | Second book, directly after The Secret and before The Magic |
| Central claim | Love is a physical force, and the law of attraction is the law of love |
| Opening epigraph | Alexander Graham Bell: "What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists" |
| Test for a positive thought | Whether it is a thought of something you want and love |
| Chapters | 12, per the library record for the first edition |
| Recurring device | A Points of Power summary block closing each chapter |
| Named practices | Almost none. This is the theory book of the three |
| Reviewed in | The New York Times by Christopher Chabris, and Newsweek by Jerry Adler, both 2010 |
| Our rating | 2.8 out of 5 |
The Secret vs The Power: What Actually Changed
These are not two different systems. They are one system described twice, and the difference is which word sits at the centre. Reading them back to back is the fastest way to see what Rhonda Byrne added in the four years between them. The sequel is longer on theory and shorter on anything you can act on, and that trade is the whole story of this book.
| Question | The Secret, 2006 | The Power, 2010 |
|---|---|---|
| What is the engine | Thought | Love, described as a force |
| What the law is called | The law of attraction | The law of love, stated as the same law |
| How you check yourself | How you feel tells you your frequency | Whether the thought is of something you love |
| Named method | The Creative Process: ask, believe, receive | No named step sequence of comparable weight |
| Named practices | Gratitude, visualization, Secret Shifters | Very few, and none with the same profile |
| Format | Ten short chapters, quotable throughout | Twelve chapters, each closing with Points of Power |
| Best use | Entry point for a reader new to any of this | The theory, for a reader who already accepted the premise |
| Press reception | Enormous, and enormously contested | Smaller, and sharper. See the criticism section below |
If you have not read either, start with our breakdown of The Secret, because The Power assumes you already read The Secret and accepted what it asserts. If what you want is the practice rather than the theory, the third book in the sequence is The Magic and its 28-day gratitude program, which is the only one of the three that hands you a schedule.
Common Criticisms of The Power
A self help book rarely gets reviewed by name in the national press. This one did, and the reviews were rough. Three critics are worth quoting because their objections are different from each other.
Christopher Chabris in The New York Times
Christopher Chabris, the psychologist best known for the invisible gorilla experiment, reviewed The Power for The New York Times in September 2010 under the title "Fight 'The Power'." His central objection was the borrowed vocabulary. The Power and The Secret, he wrote, are larded with references to magnets, energy and quantum mechanics. Physics terms are doing rhetorical work they are not entitled to do, and no physicist has claimed otherwise. This is the same objection that has followed the law of attraction since long before Byrne, and Wikipedia records it as the standard criticism of the book.
Jerry Adler's verdict in Newsweek
Jerry Adler reviewed The Power for Newsweek on August 20, 2010, and his objection is the harshest on record. Byrne describes taking meaning from overheard fragments of strangers' conversations. Adler's response was to name the pattern: there is a term for this belief, he wrote, it is called "ideas of reference," and it is a common symptom of psychosis. He was careful to add that he had no reason to think Byrne is crazy. He still called the book "certainly a deeply, disturbingly strange book," and his closing recommendation was the power of reason instead.
Tauriq Moosa on why the theory cannot lose
Writing at 3 Quarks Daily on August 30, 2010, Tauriq Moosa made the structural argument. "A theory that explains everything explains nothing," he wrote. "Unfalsifiable claims are useless." His second objection was moral rather than logical: he read the book as dissolving any responsibility for other people's suffering, since in its scheme other people's problems are their own. That is a serious charge, and it is the one Byrne's framework has never had a clean answer to.
The examples do the arguing
The book leans on anecdotes where the outcome is known before the analysis starts. One describes a woman left with nothing after twenty years of an abusive marriage who, in Byrne's telling, refused to let resentment take root, spoke only about what she loved, and eventually remarried and moved abroad. As a story about resilience it is moving. As evidence for a law of physics it is one unverified case selected because it ends well. No case that ends badly appears, which is what an unfalsifiable theory looks like from the inside.
The money chapter and the reader it leaves out
The applied chapter on money is where the theory meets its hardest test. Byrne's account leaves no room for structural explanations of why one person is poor and another is rich, because in her framework the difference is what each gave out. Moosa criticized exactly that reasoning. This review takes no position on anyone's finances and makes no claim about income or results. It notes only that a reader in genuine financial difficulty will find the book explaining their situation back to them as something they generated.
Nothing here for the reader who does it and gets nothing
This one follows every book on the shelf. Give out love, watch your feelings, get nothing back, and The Power has no diagnostic to offer. The implied answer is that you were still giving out negative feelings somewhere, which restates the premise rather than testing it. It is why a lot of readers finish energized and quit six weeks later.
The criticisms at a glance
| What the book claims | The objection | Who made it |
|---|---|---|
| Love is a force comparable to gravity and electromagnetism | The physics vocabulary is borrowed, not earned | Christopher Chabris, The New York Times, September 2010 |
| Overheard words carry personal meaning for you | Named as "ideas of reference," a common symptom of psychosis | Jerry Adler, Newsweek, August 20, 2010 |
| The law of love governs every outcome in your life | "A theory that explains everything explains nothing" | Tauriq Moosa, 3 Quarks Daily, August 30, 2010 |
| What happens to people follows what they give out | Dissolves any responsibility for other people's suffering | Tauriq Moosa, 3 Quarks Daily, August 30, 2010 |
| Newton's third law explains why what you give returns | The law describes forces between bodies, not conduct | This review |
| The stories in the book show the law working | Every example is selected because it ended well | This review |
Is The Power by Rhonda Byrne Worth Reading
Read it if you accepted the premise of The Secret and want Byrne's fullest attempt to say why it should work. Read it if the test for a positive thought appeals to you, because sorting your thinking by what you actually love is usable whatever you believe about the mechanism. Read it if you want to understand the argument well enough to argue with it.
Read it also if you are studying the genre. As a self help book The Power is a clean specimen of how a claim gets restated as a natural law, and how examples get selected to support it. Very few titles in the category make the move that openly.
Readers who want the feelings idea worked out with more machinery usually land on Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks, which builds a graded emotional scale instead of a single good-or-bad reading. Readers who want the older and plainer version of the same argument end up with James Allen's As a Man Thinketh from 1903, which covers a great deal of this ground in a fraction of the space.
Skip it if you want something to do on Monday morning, because there is very little practice here. Skip it if the physics language will irritate you, since it never lets up. Skip it if you already read The Secret and found it thin, as this book is thinner on method. And skip it if you want a book that treats hardship as anything other than a signal about the person experiencing it.
Our rating: 2.8 out of 5. Credit for one genuinely clarifying idea, the test of whether a thought is about something you love, and for the Points of Power structure that makes the book navigable. Deductions for the borrowed physics, the missing practice, examples chosen rather than examined, and a framework with no room for a reader whose circumstances are not their own doing.
Why Kevin Trudeau's Readers Keep Comparing This Book to His Material
Trudeau does not disagree with Byrne's starting point. His stated position, laid out in his commentary on what he says sits behind The Secret, is that she gave a simplified version and left out critical components. The Power is where that gap is easiest to see, because the book is nothing but theory.
Two of his named frameworks make the contrast. The first is the Training Balance Scale, which he describes as roughly 90 percent mindset, emotion and vibration against 10 percent physical strategy. On paper that sounds like agreement with Byrne. It is not, because his 90 percent is a training load rather than a state of mind you adopt. He treats manifestation as a skill you drill, not a switch you flip.
The second is the THETA state, which he describes as a brainwave range of 4 to 8 Hz and calls the frequency where the subconscious can be reprogrammed. Byrne uses the word frequency constantly and never attaches it to anything measurable. Trudeau attaches his to a number. Whether that number carries the weight he puts on it is a separate question, but the difference in style is the difference between the two bodies of work: one describes, the other prescribes a procedure.
For the head-to-head rather than a review, it is written up in Your Wish Is Your Command vs The Secret.
Where The Power Sits Next to the Global Information Network
Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009 as a private membership club, built on his claim that the most useful knowledge about wealth and success was kept out of general circulation on purpose. His material runs as a sequence, one component after another, rather than as a single insight restated.
That is the honest comparison. The Power is one insight held for 272 pages, and Byrne is upfront about it. If the insight lands for you, the book is worth an evening. If it does not, rereading will not change that, because there is no second idea underneath waiting to be found.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Power by Rhonda Byrne about?
It argues that love is a physical force running the universe and that the law of attraction is really the law of love. Byrne's position is that what you give out in thought and feeling returns to you equally, and that feelings tell you moment to moment which frequency you are giving out. It is the theory book of her series rather than a book of practices.
Is The Power a sequel to The Secret?
Yes. It was published on August 17, 2010, four years after The Secret, and Wikipedia lists it as the second book in the series, followed by The Magic in 2012. It assumes you already accept the premise of the first book and spends its pages on why Byrne believes the mechanism works rather than on restating what it is.
What does Byrne mean when she calls love a force?
She means it literally, not as a metaphor. Her argument is that gravity and electromagnetism are invisible to the senses yet undeniably powerful, and that love is invisible in the same way and stronger than either. No physicist describes love this way. Read it as Byrne's claim about how she believes the universe operates.
How long is The Power and how is it organized?
The first edition hardcover runs 272 pages. The library record for that edition lists twelve chapters, opening with What Is The Power and moving through three chapters on feelings before applying the idea to money, relationships and health. Each chapter closes with a bulleted Points of Power summary, which is the fastest way to read the book.
What did critics say about The Power?
Christopher Chabris reviewed it for The New York Times in September 2010 and objected that the book is larded with references to magnets, energy and quantum mechanics. Jerry Adler called it a deeply, disturbingly strange book in Newsweek on August 20, 2010. Tauriq Moosa wrote at 3 Quarks Daily on August 30, 2010 that a theory which explains everything explains nothing.
Does The Power give you anything to practice?
Very little, and that is the main complaint from readers who liked the earlier book. The Power describes a mechanism and tells you to give out love and watch your feelings. It contains no equivalent of the Creative Process from The Secret and no daily program. For structured practice, the third book in the series is the one built around a 28-day schedule.
Which Rhonda Byrne book should you read first?
The Secret, in almost every case. It is shorter, simpler and it states the premise this book takes for granted. Read The Power second if you want the reasoning behind the premise. Read The Magic if what you actually want is a daily practice rather than an argument.
Is The Power worth reading if you already read The Secret?
Only if you want the theory. The overlap is large and the new material is mostly the reframing of attraction as love, plus a cleaner test for whether a thought is positive. If you finished The Secret wanting instructions rather than explanation, this is the wrong next book.
The Power by Rhonda Byrne Book Review: The Short Version
One claim, held for 272 pages: love is a force, and the law of attraction is the law of love. The best thing in it is a simple test for whether a thought is positive, namely whether it is a thought of something you love. The worst thing in it is physics vocabulary that no physicist would sign. Christopher Chabris said so in The New York Times, Jerry Adler said worse in Newsweek, and Tauriq Moosa pointed out that a theory explaining every outcome explains none of them. Read it for the argument. Do not expect a method.