Good gracious me… This has been an awesome year for teen books! And I don’ know that there are many more awesome books than Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. It’s the story of Marcus, a teenager not unlike yourself, who lives in San Francisco. Marcus knows his technology backwards and forwards, and he uses it to get past his school’s security system, with its RFIDs, gait-recognition cams, and truancy websites. He and his friends ditch one day to go play Harajuku Fun Madness, perhaps the coolest Alternate Reality Game ever not to exist in real life.
But Marcus and friends end up being in the wrong place at a very wrong time – San Francisco is attacked by terrorists, blowing up the East Bay Bridge and killing thousands. When the Department of Homeland Security comes on the scene, they suspect Marcus and his friends as terrorists and subject them to days of interrogation and torture. They finally release them, but warn Marcus that “this is as good as it gets.” They will be watching him and if he ever tells anyone that he was tortured by his own government, the DHS will come for him. They’ve made the Bay Area into a police state, where people are constantly tracked and monitored, and teens are always suspect. Marcus isn’t the sort of guy to let this pass. He starts up a movement amongst the teens of the Bay Area to fight the DHS and keep the rest of the country from turning where Big Brother is always watching.
If you love technology, it’s hard to resist this book. And if you’re like me, and have a good smattering of tech-knowledge (ha ha ha), then you’ll appreciate how Doctorow explains things like hacking an xBox 360 or tunneling or encryption. Nothing in this book is outside the realm of possibility right now, which makes it all the more scary.
But what’s that you say? You want to read Little Brother, but you don’t have time to check it out? Well, why didn’t you say so? Cory Doctorow has made it easy for you to download the book for free and read it. Check it out on his website!
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