Little Brother Novel Review

Do you love freedom? Of course you do; everyone in this country loves their freedom, and some even seem to love to brag about their freedom. In that case, the answer to the question of how you'd feel if that freedom was suddenly taken away from you should be obvious; you'd be pissed beyond belief. The question is, how would you respond? Would you spend the rest of your life being thought of as a terrorist, or would you fight to get your freedom back? I first found out about this book when finding it in my school's library, and because of how interesting it seemed, I decided to read it. I have to say, this book lived up to my expectations, if not going beyond.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is my review for the novel, Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow.

Little Brother revolves around Marcus Yallow, a 17-year-old hacker/techno whiz who lives in San Francisco. He, along with his friends, Darryl Glover, Vanessa "Van" Pak, and Jose-Luis "Jolu" Torrez, skipped school one day to play Harajuku Fun Madness, a video game that has real-life quests. Suddenly, a set of explosions goes off, and the four are caught up in it. They are then arrested by the Department of Homeland Security (or DHS, for short) and interrogated for several days before finally, they're all let free.... well, Marcus, Van, and Jolu are set free, anyway. Darryl's whereabouts are unknown at this point. Anyway, when Marcus, Van, and Jolu come back to San Francisco, they find that they now live in a world where the DHS is monitoring their every move. Yeah, literally. Thus, Marcus decides to fight the DHS by creating an Internet network from the Xbox, also known as the Xnet.

I started reading this expecting a techno-geek rebellion, and a techno-geek rebellion is what I got. However, that's not all; Cory Doctorow's writing style describes a lot of mature themes in pretty good detail. He describes the actions of the DHS, Marcus' actions, and the actions of other characters in great detail, and the thoughts of Marcus are quite believable. Of course, some of the details that are described seem unnecessary at times, but everything that is described in this novel is done so for a purpose. For example, it is revealed at one point in the book that Marcus was once a LARPer (someone who does live-action role-playing); I won't give out spoilers as to how, but this revelation does, indeed, serve a purpose.

The story does have a bunch of character development, especially for Marcus. Marcus himself is an interesting character; maybe I just think that because he's the protagonist, but it's really not everyday that there's a protagonist who hacked computers before the events of the book. There are some characters that I liked at first who I ended up not liking so much at the end, though. For example, I ended up not liking Van so much; she seemed like a cool character at first, though. There was one character, Ange, who was introduced later in the book, but I liked her from the minute she first appeared. I liked how strong-willed she was, and the way she liked to use pepper spray as a condiment was kind of funny.

Overall, Little Brother was an interesting book. I'd recommend reading it, although it might make you feel afraid of what may happen in the near future.