Cory Doctorow‘s Little Brother already has a ton of good reviews out there. Does it need another one? I guess good reviews are not like cake frosting; You can’t get too much of them. So here is my review.

Little Brother is the smartest and most interesting Young Adult book I have read in a long, long while. It’s the story of hacker kids who use technologies to fight an oppressive government and claim back their liberties and privacy. It’s a book about civil liberties and rights, freedom, and how a obsessive governments can cross the line and become The Enemy.

Little Brother is an important book because it teaches the reader how technologies work, how they can be used to track and spy on you, but also how you can use them to remain anonymous and prevent anyone from intercepting your communications. Anybody using a computer and the Internet should know about this stuff, and reading a good techno-thriller is not a bad way to learn all of that. The technology described in this book by Cory Doctorow is accurate and up-to-date; He does not take any of the lame shortcuts some writers take (having technology perform impossible magic tricks to suite the purpose of the story.) The story is solid, embedded with computers, smart phones, wireless access points, RFID tags, video games; everything that is part of the life of a tech-savvy kid nowaday.

I had to laugh when I read the characters talking about L.A.R.P., as I was playing these sorts of games in high school and college. In some way, I guess I liked the story because I really could connect with Marcus, the protagonist of this novel.

Little Brother will get my vote for the Hugo Awards next year. Not only because it’s a good story, but because it’s an important book. It is important because it makes the readers aware of the technology surrounding them, and teaches them what they can do about it. Needless to say, I hardly recommand it to anybody, no matter if you are a teenager or an adult. If you use a computer, a cell phone or the Internet, you have to be aware of this stuff.

You can get Little Brother from most book stores. Buy it from Amazon to support my blog. If you would like to read it for free, you can pick the eBook version on Cory’s web site, available under this Creative Commons license. And if you enjoy audio books, Little Brother is available from Zipidee for 20$. I bought the audio book and really liked it. The voice talent did an amazing job at rendering the emotions of the characters. If you want to listen to it to see if you like it, search the web; Cory gave the permission to redistribute and mix up to 30 minutes of the audio book so there are plenty of audio clips all over the web for you to listen.

Did you read the book? Let me know what you are thinking of it here in the comments section.

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Lectures by Alexandre Lemieux