Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 26-30 of 142
 A Cautionary Tale May 25, 2009
Carl Brennan (Denver, CO)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Doctorow's book looks at a possible future in which the excesses of "enhanced interrogations" are visited upon US citizens by the Department of Homeland Security after a terror attack. The book follows a precocious 17-year-old and his friends who are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
While the book makes villains out of America's right wing as perpetrators of making a terrorist attack serve as an excuse to take over, I wonder if Doctorow might change his tune now that we have a White House Chief of Staff who's said that a crisis must not be wasted?
Despite my political misgivings, I enjoyed the book and concur with Doctorow's observations regarding how security measures almost always inconvenience the innocent and miss the guilty.
 a bit too simplistic May 12, 2009
Joyce Ronquillo (Lacombe, LA)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a good book to encourage thoughtful discussions about the differences between secrecy and privacy or freedom and liberty. It is, though, a bit too black and white, too simplistic in its viewpoint. Of course, teenagers tend to be simplistic in their worldview, it comes from their lack of life experience. The frequent asides to explain the geeky stuff were interesting, even fascinating, but ultimately too distracting from the story. The use of every modern "evil despot" trope was too much. It became a child's story of ever escalating horrors and lost its effectiveness. A good cautionary tale does not serve up every evil on the same plate. That said, I think the book is quite enjoyable as a near future thriller. As an aside, I found the VampMob charming and funny.
 Meh. May 8, 2009
Reader Rabbit (readerrabbit.blogspot.com)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Little Brother was blurbed by the likes of Neil Gaiman and Scott Westerfeld. It's appeared on multiple best books of 2008 lists, received a ton of great reviews and is a contender for The Hugo Award for best novel.
Marcus, a seventeen year-old hacker, is skipping school with three of his friends when Bay Bridge is blown up. In the chaos, he and his friends are mistaken for perpetrators and captured by the police. They are taken to an unknown location where they are interrogated for days. When they're finally released, Marcus is shocked to discover the methods police use to "prevent terrorism" (which often include taken away citizens' rights).
He refuses to take this lying down-ultimately, deciding to take the problem into his own hands. He's a smart, technologically aware teen and soon he's found himself leading a following of people, devoted to exposing the government's misdemeanors.
At first, I found the book engaging, informative (but still interesting) and hard to put down. However, subtle would not be the best word to describe the book. It's filled with paragraphs explaining technology (such as LARPing, gait-recognition software, etc.) and paragraphs that almost seem to lecture you. On one hand, I knew very little about the technology Marcus described and the way it was presented was easy to understand and in some cases, absolutely fascinating. But, on the other hand, those moments tended to take me out of the story. Sometimes I felt as if the book sacrificed a better-developed plotline and characters for the message.
Still, the novel's an excellent way to spark a discussion-the exact discussion that needs to be had at a point where we all rely on technology so much (without fully understanding it) and how easy it would be for our rights to be taken away.
Little Brother is also a coming-of-age novel. By the end of the novel, Marcus had made a lot of mistakes (and learned from them..most of the time), fallen in love and grown up. He's a smart, believable character just like the novel (in fact, the novel's premise is frighteningly realistic). Despite my problems with the book, I would still recommend reading it
 Cartoonish Straw-Man Liberalism May 8, 2009
J. Bradley Hicks (St Louis, MO USA)
12 out of 28 found this review helpful
It's George Bush's 3rd term, and nobody in the book thinks this is remarkable. Karl Rove is conspiring with the head of Homeland Security to facilitate al Qaeda attacks on the US, in order to pass another round of PATRIOT Acts. Fortunately, Karl Rove and his army of torture-murderers are dumber than a group of teenagers who specialize in skipping school to play alternate-reality games.
If you think that the premise of this novel is plausible, there is something wrong with you, not just wrong with you as a person, but wrong with you in the head. Seek professional medical help; they're doing remarkable things for paranoid schizophrenia these days. Because no sane person believes that this is even vaguely possible, let alone unremarkable to claim, except the kind of cartoon straw-men liberals who only exist in the fantasies of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. Well, them, and apparently Cory Doctorow, and everybody else who recommend this ugly piece of 9/11 revisionism. I weep for my country.
Too bad it's YA May 8, 2009
Claywise (Niwot, CO, USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
While I enjoyed the book immensely and now understand the effusive praise from such people as Neil Gaiman, I found myself wishing it hadn't been written as YA.
Many people seem to think YA means "featuring a young protagonist." But there are books aplenty - from "Dune" to "Catcher in the Rye" - with young protagonists that aren't, in any real sense, YA books.
The problem with "Little Brother" is that these uber-hip, techno-savvy, sexually adventurous kids use "expletives" like "screw" and "friggin'." Sorry. No way would they use such dork-isms. Kip in "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" was a less worldly kid of the '50s who might have gotten away with "gollies" - these guys simply do not, and it makes them considerably less real than they might otherwise have been.
Another complaint: A surprising number of expository lumps. Our narrator frequently "turns to the camera" to explain this concept or that. The stuff is interesting, and certainly illuminating to a non-techie reader like me, but it violates a basic rule of good writing, IMO.
Still, it's a good book. A fine story with a powerful message.
Showing reviews 26-30 of 142
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