Flight into Fantasy

In which I review a seriously overhyped YA SF novel.
Title: Little Brother
Author: Cory Doctorow
Genre: science fiction
Excerpt: You can actually download the whole thing here
Reason for Reading: It had been on my radar for quite a while, but it wasn’t until Thea reviewed it that I decided to try it.
Synopsis:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

My Thoughts: If you go to the Amazon page linked above, you’ll see lots of critical acclaim for this book. That’s how it got to my attention, so I eventually knew I had to read it to see if the hype amounted to anything. To be fair, there’s a lot going for this book, not least of which is the fact that it can be downloaded for free from the author’s site. I also really like what Doctorow has to say, but the fact is, when I read, I want relatable characters, and Little Brother didn’t provide. Not only that, but I just felt like there was too much Doctorow in the story and not enough Marcus.

Little Brother is set in that famous science fiction construct, Twenty minutes into the future. It’s a future that is not unlike our present, and from what little googling I’ve done afterword, seems likely to happen. Unfortunately, this trope will probably make the book seem dated in a few years. At least, one hopes. When terrorists attack San Francisco, Marcus Yallow and his friends are at the wrong place at the wrong time and are picked up by Homeland Security and interrogated. They’re suspicious of Marcus because he doesn’t give the passwords he’s got on all his technology right away. After a humiliating interrogation, Marcus and his friends are released, minus one of their number, and Marcus is determined to fight against the injustices perpetrated by the DHS.
What really worked for me about this setup was the use of technology. It all seems so very plausible that I half want to find myself an XBox and see if I can use it to get online. If anything, I learned a lot about what technology can do, and Doctorow’s extrapolations about where it can go from here are fascinating.

Unfortunately, as I said, the characters leave something to be desired. Marcus is likeable enough, but he’s so encumbered by Doctorow’s message that he’s never quite allowed to escape and become a three-demensional character. The few moments of vulnerability he experiences are quite moving, but then he figures out how to solve his latest problem, and I was never left in any doubt that in the end he would prove victorious, since he was basically the author’s self-insert. His friends aren’t given much more depth, either, though I did quite like his love interest. And the less I say about the DHS goons, the better.

Speaking of self-inserts, there really are a lot of them in this book, and I mean that literally. Doctorow dedicates every chapter to a different bookstore. This brought me out of the book every time it happened, and while I’m sure that the information is excellent, it seems like highlighting his favorite bookstores is maybe something he should have done somewhere else. In addition to all that, Doctorow takes the opportunity to engage in massive amounts of fillibustering on everything from technology to politics and the threat to our rights to privacy. While I agree with most of his positions, this was seriously annoying after a while.

When the plot is allowed to happen, it is engaging, and there were moments where, despite massive eyerolling in the beginning, I enjoyed it. The climax, while rolling along about like I thought it would, had me glued to the edge of my seat, and I liked the end, which was positive without wrapping things up too neatly.

Final Verdict: Pauses in the action for the author to air his political views and characters who were flat and bland made this book’s interesting premise fizzle without ever getting a chance to work properly. My grade: A C-. Then again, I guess I get what I paid for.

I haven’t reported my book reading for a while, so will do so here.

Books 27-29 were the remaining three books in Louise Rennison’s series about Georgia Nicolson. They’re called Knocked out by my Nunga-Nungas, Dancing in my Nuddy-Pants and Away Laughing on a fast Camel. There’s another book out, but it’s not anywhere where I can access it. The last three books in the series were quick reads. Rennison clearly is putting out product now, and is more likely to make jokes about knickers than tell a good story. And I hated Georgia with each passing moment.

Book 30: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. I struggled through this book, too, because at the time I had nothing else to read. I found lots of the themes disturbing, and not in a pleasant way.
The climax of the book concerned the two main characters, Lyra and Will, falling in love and, well, having sex. Those characters were maybe twelve and thirteen. I thought the very idea of that was creepy. And the anti-religion stuff annoyed me, even though I’m not religious myself.

Book 31: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. I love this book. It took me ages and ages to get into it, and I’m moving through A Clash of Kings at about the same pace, although that’s because someone else has A Storm of Swords checked out from the library already. Anyway, once I got all the people straight in my head, AGOT was a wonderful book. It’s not light reading, and nothing happens as you’d expect it to. Martin draws his characters well. There is no real good or evil, just a lot of moral ambiguity, which I like because, yes, that’s how things are in the real world.

Book 25: on the Bright Side, I’m now the Girlfriend of a Sex God is the sequel to Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging. Like its predecessor, this book was extremely cute. But it had the exact same flaws–namely the heroine, Georgia Nicolson, is a little snot who should be smacked upside the head.

Speaking of people who should be smacked upside the head:

Lolita was my book club’s selection this month. I did not enjoy it. I’m apparently not enough of an intellectual reader to pick up on the myriad symbols present in the text, and I found the characters, at best flat and boring, and at worst irritatingly whiny and psychotic. Plus, it’s about a pedophile. I just really couldn’t get past that.

So while I’m happily (or not, as the case may be) tripping through Lolita, I am also indulging in a bit of fluffy YA stuff. This particular series of books was recommended to me by my sister, who has excellent tastes. I didn’t think this first book was nearly as funny as she did, and our heroine, who keeps a journal in the style of Bridget Jones, really is as superficial and shallow as people accuse her of being. But some of her antics–like going to a boy for kissing lessons, and accidentally shaving off her eyebrows–are quite hysterically funny.

This book actually had me going along swimmingly at first. I love urban fantasy, and part of the action was centered in our own universe. But this sequel to The Golden Compass suffered from a lot of the same problems as its predecessor.

My biggest beef with the second book (and what I have read so far of the third) is that the main character, Lyra, becomes such a wuss. She totally lets Will, arguably the main character in the second book, walk all over her and dictate what she should and shouldn’t do, which is way out of character from the first book.

And the theme of “religion sucks” starts to pervade the series more clearly in this second book, though Pullman doesn’t start pounding us over the head with that theme until early in the third book.

So every book critic I’ve ever read who reviews SF and fantasy novels has said that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books are excellent. So I found copies and started in on the series.

I really don’t like the books as much as I thought I would. Only toward the end of this first book did I really become engaged with the characters, so I guess it’s a good thing there are two more books.

As a character, I don’t particularly like Lyra Belacqua, the protagonist. I find her annoying rather than spunky. Then again, I don’t really like kids all that much.

However, people with different personal preferences than mine will probably find this book good reading. It just wasn’t for me.

This is the sequel to Welcome to the Ark which I wrote about here yesterday. It tells the story of Elijah, one of the characters in the previous book, a stereotypically “special” seemingly autistic kid.

Elijah runs away during the end of the first book, and in the second he’s caught by members of a radical environmental terrorist group.

This book didn’t flow quite as well as the first one did. In the first book, I could at least relate to the characters and the themes, even though I hated that they were bombarding the story. This book, though, while an interesting enough story, didn’t do much for me at all. I guess I really don’t like to read about paragons of human purity and goodness, and that’s how Elijah comes across.

This book (and its sequel) are very quick reads, since they’re young adult novels. This particular book, by author Stephanie S. Tolan, tells the story of four very bright kids admitted to a mental hospital who form a “family”. The kids have special powers, and learn about the global interconnectedness of all people.

This was a reread for me, and honestly I didn’t like it the second time around. Not that I have a problem with the message behind the books–I’m as much a pinko Liberal socialist commie bastard as you’re likely to find. I just don’t really like for my reading to be so heavy-handed with the morals and preaching. Even if I agree with it.

But the characters did feel real to me, and I could understand their feelings of isolation and wish I could do the things they can do.

So I guess I’d say, if you don’t mind a little bit of preaching, check this one out. If you like a well-told story set in modern times with supernatural elements, there are probably way better books out there.