Little Brother, Cory Doctorow. I think this is going to be a huge book. Obviously, young adult literature is where it's at right now, in terms of big sales. I think that this could be a big school book, too, though, something that winds up in a lot of classrooms and summer reading lists.
Doctorow of course is a pretty famous thinker about technology and civil liberties, and so it's not surprising that he's found an effective way of tying that to his career as a science fiction writer. It's hard to spot even a single mis-step with this book. Pacing is excellent -- even when he has to step back from the story to explain some bit of techno ephemera, he never lost me. He maybe pulls his punches a little bit at the end, but I'm not sure how else he could have ended the book. Oh, and he maybe name-checks his organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a little hard. There are two separate passages -- one pretty long -- singing the praises of EFF, which . . . fine. I'm a fan of them. I get it. But considering that the book ends with an extensive annotated bibliography including another long reference to EFF?
Whatever. These are small quibbles. Read this book. Find some young person to give it to.
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