Little Brother

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on an advance reading copy of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Despite a great deal of illness around here, I was totally sucked into this book, and I shamelessly neglected my sick children and overworked husband whenever possible to sneak in a few more pages. I managed to finish the book last night.

Little Brother gives us a blood-chilling peek into what life could be like after another major terrorist attack. In a near-future San Francisco, the Department of Homeland Security has run amok in its efforts to hunt down the bad guys. Countless innocents are caught up in the wide net cast by the DHS, and citizens are forced to choose between willingly giving up their civil right and liberties or fighting back and falling under DHS suspicion. Marcus (aka w1n5t0n aka m1k3y) is a 17-year-old techno-geek who fights back after spending several days being interrogated by the DHS for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In addition to gripping action, this book provides an eduction: You'll learn about techno-topics such as the paradox of the false positive and how cryptography works, and you'll pick up a little leet and learn about online gaming along the way. (I'm assuming that most of my usual readers aren't too familiar with these topics. Read the book anyway, because it's awesome and you'll pick up what you need to know along the way. And if you are already familiar with these topics, you'll love the book all the more, as I did.) You'll read about Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, Jack Kerouac, and Allan Ginsberg. This book provides a great introduction to those topics for YA readers, and should be an enjoyable refresher course for us grown-ups.

If you know a tween/teenager who likes to read smart books, get this book. If you like to read smart books, get this book. (A warning for parents: I don't know how they classify "young adult" books these days, and was somewhat surprised that a book with such strong language, sexual content, and a downright terrifying plot gets that label. But I'm an old prude who's totally forgotten what it's like to be 13. And, if I think back, I recall that I was raiding my mom's stash of non-young-adult sci-fi and fantasy books when I was in second grade, so clearly I'm out of touch with my own youth.)

And in closing, let me say: Seriously. Read this book. It is important, enlightening, entertaining -- and let's hope it's not prophetic.