Let's eat Grandpa!

Britt's never without a book...

My good friend Brittney and I read Little Brother around the same time. We were talking about it one day, and I asked if she wanted to write a guest review. Man, the girl can break down her thoughts on a book like no one else. Let’s all convince her that she needs to blog her book reviews, eh? (Commence peer pressure now!)

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Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is a realistic-dystopic tale told of a teenage boy in post-terrorized San Francisco who single-handedly fights back against the evil Department of Homeland security minions who threaten the civil rights of the Bay Area inhabitants.
 
Doctorow’s teenage hero starts off the story by getting arrested, detained, beaten, and tortured in a completely unbelievable fashion following a terrorist bombing of the Bay Bridge, and then proceeds to spend the rest of the book thwarting the Big Brother tactics of the Department of Homeland Security.  The book ends with the city/state throwing out the DOH and rejecting all technological forms of citizen trackery that were introduced throughout the plot.
 
First, the plot/characterization/writing was immature and rough – it was what I’d expect from a high-school student writing their first novel.  I forgot almost immediately that the hero was supposed to be 17 years old because he consistently acted, talked, and thought like he was 12.  The thing that bugged me most was how Marcus’s love interest was developed – she seemed to act suspiciously and inconsistently, and I spent the whole story waiting for a revelation that she was a spy or had an ulterior motive to dating Marcus.  It never came, and I was left wondering what was so messed up about the girl.
 
Secondly, Doctorow never dealt with his central subject in a sophisticated, intelligent way. I couldn’t figure out whether this book was the author’s rally against federalism and a strong central government (the California governor ends up throwing out the dastardly DOH goons – take that, Hamilton!) or simply his treatise on what will happen if we give up civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism.  Maybe it was both, but I felt like my brain had been bludgeoned with a two-by-four named “They’ll take away your civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism!”
 
First off, I’m a pretty strong civil rights proponent – I tend toward the conservative “Government exists to keep citizens from harming each other” version rather than the “Government can do good, so it should run programs and shape culture, etc.” (still talking about central govt, not local govt – different story, there).  That being said, I thought Doctorow’s story was incredibly one-sided, overblown, and heavy-handed. 
 
The mark of an exceptional author who writes about a controversial subject with finesse is that they 1) are realistic about the problem, and 2) address counter-arguments intelligently.  Doctorow’s story NEVER felt real to me (can someone say paranoia?), and his way of dealing with opposing points of view was to dump them into the character of Marcus’s dad, and then paint Dad as out of touch with the times, resistant to change, and prone to excessive pride and stubbornness.  Not exactly an academic retort to his thesis that the government is going to use the opportunity of terrorism to turn into a dictatorship. 
 
The context of this discussion is so much more complicated than that – according to Doctorow, the people that worked for the Dept of Homeland Security were evil goons who were power hungry and didn’t care about actual people.  I have found civil servants in the federal government to be quite contrary to that depiction – and the bosses at the top that call the shots do so with a huge burden on their backs of trying to protect people from harm (which is what we expect the government to do!). I don’t think any president in our history has sent soldiers off to war lightly, and bear the great weight of responsibility that they ordered a few people to their death in order to protect our precious civil rights. 
 
The Department of Homeland Security is no different than any branch of military, the CIA, or the FBI.  All fall under the authority of the executive, and all are charged with protecting the values held in our constitution.  It is the Legislature’s job to make laws that contain that power, if they see it being abused, and the Judicial branch’s job to determine when the DOH’s actions have overstepped those constitutional or legislative bounds and censure them.  I found this story to be so flat, because it didn’t even try to deal with any of the complexity behind this topic.  Even if Doctorow disagrees that this structure works, or sees it as corrupt, I would have liked him to at least acknowledge that it exists!
 
I really hope that this was written with a teen audience in mind, because they are the only ones that I think will appreciate it (I can screw the government with my xBox! Cool!), but I do hope that even the next generation of adolescents have more of a brain than Mr. Doctorow.