Never trust anyone over 25

I just finished "Little Brother" by Cory Doctrow and I loved it and will recommend it: it was one of the most fun and simultaneously most political things I've ever read. I felt the insane pressure of the past 8 years government pressing in, and then got to remember that it really happened, we really did away with that regime through the power of voting. It is the perfect novel for the perfect time. But, I have a few thoughts to organize about it as well:

-Marcus was a Mary Sue right? I mean that's fine, but it was like I was watching a Brad Pitt movie and afterwords I can't remember the name of Brad Pitt's character even though it was the title of the movie because all I could remember was that Brad Pitt was in it.

-I just got home from Thanksgiving with my family and all I can think is that I don't want my baby nephew, Zane, to grow up in a world like Marcus is living in. But it is too late. And it is our fault. And at the same time I feel like electing Obama might be a reversal in those fortunes, and for the first time in.so.long. I am truly and actually proud to be a member of this fed up nation.

-Long preachy interludes about the technical side of programming and hacking and math are sometimes fun to read in narrative fiction, too many of them and no matter how good the story is and how integral they are to the plot and I kind of want to throw the book across the room when I'm being told that I NEED to take up learning Python to be a complete person. Teenagers today already know so much of this stuff that I'm not sure how much of it really was integral to the plot. The much sneakier and better interludes were about history, the kind of history that the official textbooks "don't have room for."

-The novel did a good job of detailing both sides of the arguments (while definitely still favoring a side, and for which I'm afraid we are preaching to the choir when recommending), but the book also did a bad job of humanizing the people on the other side. Obviously the DHS shouldn't be, but the duped people who believed the DHS was actually trying to help, they needed more realistic faces. It isn't all just old stodgy people set in their ways. It isn't just your parents and business people and snotty kids you never liked anyway.



The ending was too abrupt. Like this one.