Little Brother

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Original ISBN 978-0-7653-1985-2
Tor, 2008.
382 pages

Plot Summary: Four teenagers, including seventeen-year old Marcus Yallow (known online as “w1n5t0n”), are detained by the Department of Homeland Security after it is believed that the teens are responsible for a terrorist attack on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the BART system. Marcus and his friends fight the Government to keep their civil liberties intact while maintaining that they are not terrorists.

Critical Evaluation: Little Brother is part dystopian part, technological thriller. It is smartly written and scary because many feel that the situation depicted in the book could someday manifest itself in reality. Anyone with a passion for the protection of the First Amendment will enjoy this book, as will techno-geeks, and those who dream of someday “sticking it to the man.”

I strongly believe that Little Brother should be required reading for high school students.

Reader’s Annotation: Marcus and his friends are accused of terrorist acts. The only way to prove their innocence is to take down the Department of Homeland Security. How can Marcus rally his friends, and the rest of America’s technology-savvy youth, to help?

Author Information: Cory Doctorow was born in Canada in 1971 and now resides in London. Doctorow, even as a youth, was a bit of an activist. He rallied for Green Peace and nuclear disarmament. He currently works as a writer and blogger with a strong passion for loosening copyright laws and file sharing practices. Little Brother, for example, is available as a free download through a Creative Commons license. Most of Doctorow’s novels deal with civil liberties, especially of teens, in this new technological age.

Doctorow is the winner of the 2004 Locus Award, 2004 Sunburst Award, 2009 White Pine Award, 2009 Prometheus Award,
and 2009 John W. Campbell Award.

His website can be found at http://craphound.com/

Genre: Dystopian fiction; Science fiction

Curriculum Ties: This novel can be used in English Language Arts as a companion piece to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Could also be used in Government class in a discussion of civil liberties.

Booktalking Ideas: I would read the essays included in within the novel.

Reading Level / Interest Age: Grades 8-12

Lexile: 900

Challenge Issues: Torturing of people at the hands of the United States government, and sexual themes.

Reason for Item’s Inclusion: This novel should be standard reading for any high school student. It is the twenty-first century’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

References:

Little Brother (Cory Doctorow novel). (2012, October 24). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_novel)