Little Brother (2008)

Little Brother (2008)
by
Cory Doctorow
read by Kirby Heyborne
___

What a pleasant surprise. I've read two novels by Doctorow now (you know that audiobooks counts as reading, right?) and I didn't know anything about them going in. But, that's okay. He's now become an author that I will seek out all the audiobooks I can find, which I think is limited to the two I've now heard, but I'll look.
I decided to give Little Brother a try because my friend asked me if I was excited about the sequel dropping - must have been a month or two ago by now. She'd read and like it and thought I might as well. You know what? She was spot on.
Interestingly this is a "YA" novel. Which I never would have guessed until I was told so in an afterwards by the author at the very end. This book dealt with some pretty weighty stuff, and while I'm not saying young adults can't deal with that, it's just more than I expect from one of the YA genre. Sure, Rowling and Pullman deal with some very adult issues including death, unlawful imprisonment and torture, but they've never had a scene of a main character being tortured in a real world method in one of their books. Unlike someone, say Riordan in his Percy Jackson books that casually mentions death and then may or may not mention that Percy is a little sad, Doctorow puts it right up front so that the characters have to deal with it, and they do so in a very human manner, which is to say not perfectly.
I bet Cory Doctorow is a very smart guy, and I bet he either was/is a teacher or wanted to be one. I say this because in, "For The Win", I learned a lot about macro-economics, a topic not unfamiliar to me, but never before explained so well. NPR could take notes on how well Doctorow explains a country fiscal policies, especially their currency policies. In "Little Brother" we learn a lot about network security and various different internet-related terms and actions, like what 'tunneling' actually is. Again, this area is not something new to me, but if I had learned this from Doctorow, it would have been very clear years ago and taken much less time to boot.
I do wonder why this was a YA book and "For The Win" wasn't. The protagonists of each are young people, the bad things that happen in each are graphically detailed, but not glorified. I'll have to look into it, maybe they're both YA and I just didn't notice. Which is okay, because it just happens that I am quite fond of YA.

Audiobook available at Amazon.com