Book 33: Little Brother

Completed May 18th

I really enjoyed this book, which was one of the best feelings ever after despising the last novel I finished. It's set in the present day, but with an alternate reality...technology is a little more advanced and available in this setting. And surveillance of every day citizens is more common as well. At least I think so. I guess there could be some camera watching me scratch my ass right now, but I like to hope that's not true.

The phrase "little brother" is a nod to "big brother." Where "big brother" refers to an authority figure or group monitoring the public, "little brother" refers to the public monitoring the authority. Kind of like "Who watches the Watchmen?" It's an interesting concept. Basically, the main character, Marcus, and his friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are detained by Homeland Security as suspected terrorists. The treatment he and his friends receive, the threats made, and the terror to which they are subjected light a fire in Marcus and he decides to fight back once he is released.

So yeah, I loved it. When I read the last page, I was ready to sign up for a revolution. It made me curious how our non-fictional government would react if the scenarios in this novel were to occur and I had a lot of questions. What is freedom? What is the price of that freedom? Under what circumstances can it be taken away? How far would you go to get it back?

There is a great deal of tech and tech jargon, but Doctorow does an excellent job of explaining it as the story progresses. And not in that let's-have-a-wordy-and-boring-timeout-to-explain-difficult-concepts way. He incorporates it into the story.

Rating: 9/10