Little Brother
Oh wait…not this Little Brother.
This one is more like it.
Personally, I did not care for Little Brother by Cory Doctorow all that much. It just never really grabbed my attention, and I even had a hard time finishing it. It just did not catch my attention, and I failed to focus on it completely at any point. The book is about the government watching over us in everything that we do through technology. Technology is used to overpower the normal individual, but Doctorow’s characters use their knowledge of technology to evade all the obstacles in their way. The rebellious teen angle is an interesting one to take; I think this aspect would grab a lot of young adults’ interest. Most teens try to do anything possible to live outside the lines set for them. The novel plays a lot of attention to security measures taken by both local authorities and the federal government. The security standards and control they have over technology is overbearing. This has been something people in the United States have been worried about for a long time and is often referred to as Big Brother, stemming from George Orwell’s novel 1984. Technologies uses can be negative as seen in parts of the book, but they can also be positive. Doctorow manages this aspect quite well honestly. He mixes in these bad uses and negatives that can happen with too much technology but gives a great way in can be used right after it. I was amazed at how many things I actually learned that you could do through this novel. There were many times where I was hit by a term that I had never heard of. Google and Wikipedia definitely became my best friends while reading this novel. It is kind of shocking to me that this novel can give away some of the knowledge and “how-to” on the issues it does and get away with it. The novel was a good experience; however, I cannot honestly say I will ever read it again or recommend it. I just was not enamored by the book.
