An important teen novel

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
This novel appears on many of the year-end lists of favourite and impotant books. I decided that I better read it, and am I ever glad I did. The title is in homage to 1984, and it is a worthy successor. Like Orwell's classic, this is not the perfectly written novel--sections are clunky and didactic--but it is a novel of ideas, not a writerly lyrical novel. Marcus is a tech-savy seventeen year old who is in the wrong place at the wrong time: he's not in school when a bridge in San Francisco is blown up and so he and three friends are picked up as suspected terrorists. He is finally released, and rather than follow the instructions of Homeland Security gone wild, he starts a movement to expose and counteract their methods of control. There is a ton of technical information, explained in terms I could (mostly) understand, about encrytion and computer security. Warning to school lan specialists and librarians everywhere--in the afterword, there are directions to download software to bust through any firewalls--but this is done in order to protect free speech and free access to the internet. Doctorow states that security systems are only good if people test them by hacking. Don't worry about that--put this book on your library shelves immediately. The younger generation needs a wake-up call to the lack of privacy they are already accepting, and a warning about how this could all go terribly wrong. There is also lot of information in this novel about the hippies. the beats and the freedom riders of the 60s in San Francisco, and Marcus, the main character, feels he is following in their footsteps, as well as defending the U.S. constitution. Over all, an important books that is easily read by teens, and yet contains many of the same concerns as 1984. This might even make them pick up a copy--or start reading Ginsberg, Kerouac, etc. who are quoted here.