Review Detail

Reader reviewed by Alan Gratz

I was reluctant to read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.
I knew what it was about: a group of
kids playing hooky from school are in the right place at the wrong time
when a 9/11-scale terrorist attack hits their city, and they are
detained by the Department of Homeland Security for interrogation. When
they emerge abused and blinking into the sunlight a week later, they
find themselves in a not-so-brave new world, one where the people of
their city have willingly resigned their personal liberties in return
for "safety."

I love Cory Doctorow's books. I've read just about all of his adult science fiction novels and short
story collections, and those I haven't read I own and have in my
teetering To-Be-Read stack. When I heard he was writing a YA novel I
was ecstatic and bought it as soon as it came out--but then I sat on
it. For a long time. Despite the great reviews. Despite it hitting the
bestseller list. Despite my ever-growing dedication to Boing Boing, the blog he co-founded and contributes to.

I avoided it because I knew it was going to be painful. Painful
like reading M.T. Anderson's Feed and realizing I am that
consumer, that unthinking harbinger of doom. This book was going to
make me angry, it was going to make me scared, and it was going to make
me want to get up off my lazy butt and do something about the world, and
I was pretty content to sit by my cozy fire and feel calm, safe, and
secure in my own home, thank you very much.

But I read it
anyway. And of course I'm glad I did. It's witty, it's romantic, it's
smart--oh gods is it smart--and it's entertaining. But it is also, of
course, all those things I feared it would be. It had to be. And that's
why every kid should read this book right now. It belongs in a
semester-long--heck, a year-long--course with Fahreinheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, Brazil, V for Vendetta, and Feed, and if I were still teaching teenagers I would chuck my entire curriculum next year and do it.

I'm
not sure I could have handled--or appreciated--this book when I was a
teenager. Knowing who I was then, I would have read it the way I read 1984
as a teen--as a cautionary allegory about taking the wrong path, not a
prescient commentary on the way the world already is. I would have
said, "I like it, but I don't believe it." My eyes weren't open enough
then to understand. But not every teenager--thankfully--is as dense as
I was then, and this book will speak to many of them. Little Brother is this generation's 1984--it
lays bare the ridiculousness of sacrificing liberty for "freedom," and
represents a call to action to the world's teenagers to adopt a healthy
mistrust of the status quo and to take the future into their own hands.

Let's just hope they're listening.