** spoiler alert ** Just finished reading the free .pdf version of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.

The writing is not the tightest I have ever read, nor does it even begin to exude elegance, but it does a decent job of keeping you reading.

I was incredibly put off by the chapter-start bookstore dedications. It felt like a weird meta sort of pandering. This is what you do when you are relentlessly self-promotional. You tell people you like them, and tell everyone in the world their name and where they "live." The obligation to the return the favor feels like less of an obligation, so now Doctorow's cultivated a network of bookshops who are probably going to be more amenable to keeping his stuff in stock, perhaps waiting for the day he strolls in (to the brick and mortar businesses, anyway) to sign whatever they've got of his on-hand. I was never allowed to read the book purely for the first several chapters, as I was worried that I might be missing some plot-related element if I skipped the bookstore plugs. After a few chapters, it became obvious that I did not need to read them at all, and became pretty adept at skipping the italicized bits before reading on. The narrative also started to become more relaxed, so it felt easier to read once the main pin of the plot started to act as its hinge.

This novel is pretty heavy-handed. I was cool with the concepts of security theatre and freedoms being slowly, subtly, and needlessly stripped from citizens volunteering them up in the name of 'Freedom,' but I was absolutely NOT down with the 2-dimensional and laughable caricatures painting Rooney and Perfect Haircut and Charles. I don't actually care how 'real' those depictions might actually be, weirdly enough. It was a cheap narrative element, and drew me out of the story so much that I actually began to resent the narrator and the hubris layered over him by the author like thick, crusty calcium deposits. The martyrdom of Marcus is all well and good as a plot device, but other than the concert event and the flash mob, there was never any real sense of the scope of what was happening in the world of the book. It isn't until much later that you actually get some mortality numbers from the book's pivotal event, and honestly, that would've been good to know much, much earlier. It's as if none of this actually occurred to Marcus until he was forced to look at it. He was clueless about the DHS people he encountered, and it only took a few minutes of television-watching to clue him in. It was also frustrating to have him be so careful about getting off the grid when the vans came by, and to make such a huge point of it, but then, when it mattered the most (after he escaped from Masha in the moving truck), when he was keeping the evidence he most needed alive and accessible (Masha's phone), he didn't seem to care much at all about being detected.

I dunno. It's a decent read, but it felt sort of hacked together, more than a little holier-than-thou. Appropriating the "Don't trust anyone over 30" slogan and re-tooling it to "25" thoroughly pissed me off, for obvious reasons. I am not the enemy, and I do not come from a generation that defines the habit of voluntarily giving up one's freedoms. I became a teenager during the Cold War, and I remember what it was like to constantly fear nuclear fallout from an attack, of Ronnie accidentally pushing the wrong button. Maybe that's something Doctorow felt necessary to put into a Young Adult book, but as a teenager, I would've found that a little insulting, especially since Marcus shows plenty of trust in his History teacher and later on, the journalist. It's ridiculous that they are painted as the exception to the rule. What a grim message to send to teenagers, who already might feel disenfranchised by simply being teenagers.

Anyway, I read it. It was intriguing initially because the kids were playing a game they called an ARG (I would have liked to have heard even more about it, but whatever), but the rest of it was, strangely enough, a lot of fear mongering, grandstanding, and a coupla sex scenes. Oh, and I was pretty irritated that Darryl became a footnote, collateral damage, unexplored. What happened to him was pretty interesting, and would have given much more gravitas to the themes of the book, but it was more important to have Marcus and Ange close out the book by sweatily groping each other in a little tiny office with their shiny new hip revolution. Sigh.