Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

A guest review from Teen Room Staff Brandon!

Marcus Yallow is a senior at Cesar Chavez High School in the Mission district of San Francisco. The teachers may all know him as Marcus, but to his closest friends, he is known as “w1n5t0n,” (pronounced Winston, not “double-you-one-en-five-tee-zero-en.”) He uses this moniker because he is a prominent figure in the tech community. See, his school has a ridiculous security code, from the use of tracking software in the school-supplied laptops, to gait-recognizing technology to track any rogue students. Marcus, being the techie that he is fools the cameras by putting rocks in his shoes, and skips school with some of his friends to play Harajuku Fun Madness, an ARG. ARG, or alternate reality game, is where teams must find clues, decipher them, and eventually reach a final prize, resulting in a trip to Tokyo.

While on the search for the next clue, Marcus and his friends are caught up in a terrorist attack on the Golden Gate Bridge. As they attempt to go the opposite way from the mad, stampeding crowds, they are taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security as suspects in the attack. Marcus is separated from his friends and released back home several days later, but his best friend Darryl is still missing. Marcus suspects foul play on the part of the DHS, and begins a search for his friend using his better than average technical abilities. His search only ends with the DHS telling him to stop looking and that they will be monitoring any of his online activities.

Now with every aspect of his life being monitored, Marcus sets out on a crusade to stick it to the DHS and save his best friend. He begins his quest anew and searches for Darryl. During his journey, Marcus avoids the government, hacks his Xbox to transmit a type of internet, and organizes one of the largest ARG meetings in history; all underneath the careful radar of the DHS. In the end, Marcus is able to clear his, and Darryl’s name, sort of. The government drops all charges against Darryl, and reduces Marcus’ from “electronic terrorism” and “inciting a riot” to “petty theft.” Marcus spends three months in a halfway house as a sentence, but for half the day he is allowed to go out to his “job.” He and his friends started a nonprofit organization to retain peoples’ rights and abate the government’s ridiculous amount of power.

Little Brother was a phenomenal book, from beginning to end. Although it is fiction, it really caused me to stop and examine my own rights. Hopefully you’ll read this book and do the same.

--Brandon