Someone Comes to Town… is the third book from Cory Doctory I’ve read, all in eBook format. I first read Standard Eastern Tribe and then Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom after a co-worker sent me the link where to download those eBooks for free (and it’s legal!) Indeed, Cory has been releasing his books for free in various eBook formats, directly from his web site under the Creative Commons license. This is the 6th novel I read completly in eBook format.

So, back to Someone Comes to Town…. The book is about Alan (or Andy, Andrew, Alex or any name starting with an « A »; it keeps changing over and over), moving in to a new neighbourhood in Toronto and helping Kurtz to setup a free wireless network. But this is just the story background which would be somehow less interesting if Alan was not a little special. Indeed, Alan’s father is a montain, his mother a washing machine and he’s been raised by golems near No-Where, Canada. His brothers are as weird: one of them is an island, one can see the future, one is an undead and the last three are russian dolls that fit one into the other. (Hey, I just realized he doesn’t have any sisters.)

As the story evolves, you keep learning more from Alan’s early days and the war his brothers and him fought among themselves. There is a little of Lord of Flies in Alan’s childhood. Alan’s main goal throughout the book keeps revolving around looking normal, being normal, and understanding normal people, which he fail miserably from time to time. His journey in his new neighbourhood allow him to meet other strange people, like this girl with bat wings. If you are familiar with the products from White Wolf, think Hunters.

The storyline is a bit confusing because of all the flashbacks that take us back to Alan’s childhood. It was especially hard for me to determine if this or that scene was occuring before or after Davey’s death. Also, the eBook version I was reading didn’t have a lot of formating clues and, in a few parts, I would think that a portion of the text should have been written in italic or indented as a long quoted…

…like this.

This makes the eBook harder to read because you often have to go back up one paragraph and read how one merge with the next to realise they really aren’t sequential or even from the same storyline.

If you are interested in the technology portion of the book, you might be interested to know that two wireless groups exist in Toronto (here and here). A really successful one was started in Montréal in 2003 and one just started in Ottawa.

Tags Technorati : book review | ebook | creative commons | fantasy | magical realism | wifi | toronto | canada

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Lectures by Alexandre Lemieux