So for my book club, I read this “young adult” novel, Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. (Don’t ask me, a 26-year-old, hard-working, harder-playing bachelor, why I belong to a book club comprised mainly of leathery men two decades my senior. It’s beside the point of this post, so don’t ask. It just works.)

This book is really important. Maybe the most important I’ve read in years. Buy it for your young adult ASAP. The premise: a high-school kid gets mistaken for a terrorist in a post-9/11 near future and is “disappeared” by the TSA. He and his friends wage an underground campaign to combat the ever- Orwellian tactics the TSA are implementing as part of a post-terrorist-incident.

The key to this book isn’t the plot though, it’s the substance of it. The book provides a convincing counterargument to the knee-jerk, reactionary fearmongering prevalent in today’s mainstream media. Every teen could use a primer in the freedoms guaranteed us by our Bill of Rights & Constitution. Truly, I cannot find a better written rebuttal to the age-old flawed tautology: “If you’ve got nothing to hide then why do you need privacy?” If you think America’s forgetting what it means to be American, getting a young person this book will be a direct countermove to this trend.

It’s also a very useful real-world tool that will teach your teens to cover their digital tracks in an ever-less-private mediascape. Tools for data encryption, online identity management, and more are profferred by futurist Doctorow (of boingboing.net fame), in the spirit of empowerment rather than mischief. If indeed the future our kids will inherit is as much or more entrenched in the online world than it is today, mastery of these tools won’t just be for the fringe power-users but fundamentals in staving off the prying eyes of a plethora of entities, not necessarily Uncle Sam.

As someone who lived very near the WTC on 9/11 and during its aftermath, some scenes in the book depicting the palpable sense of panic and terror on or around such events hit home very intensely, which, to me, is a good thing. Not many fictional accounts have nailed the sense of confusion and helplessness, and as a firsthand witness, I’ve got to say Doctorow nailed it, and it’s a healthy thing to relive through the medium of fiction.

The prose is easy-to-read (took me a few hours cover to cover), solid though maybe not worthy of poetry awards… but to look at this aspect of the book misses the point.
It’s a novel of ideas, which is something that strikes me as strangely absent from the Young Adult genre. Truly, get this book for any 12-year-old in your life. It transcends politics, so it doesn’t matter if you’re red or blue. It’s highly entertaining. And most importantly, it’s just a remarkable effective method of delivery for important discussions of privacy and liberty versus security in both the digital and post-9/11 age, which may or may not be the most important issue of our times… ambitious for a Young Adult novel, but ultimately successful in its mission. NOW GO BUY IT! SERIOUSLY!

Little Brother
By Cory Doctorow

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