\nA seventeen-year-old boy ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time (near a major terrorist attack on San Francisco). Angry men push him into a DHS van and take him to an interrogation facility. He tries to be principled, refusing to unlock his phone etc, but soon surrenders to the interrogators’ will. When they have all they want, he is released, but with very obvious hints that if he mentions his experience to anyone, he could easily disappear.\n<\/p>\n
\nWhen he gets back home (where his parents had believed him dead, because they had not been informed of his capture – he could have been a terrorist, after all) he discovers that within just a few days, the city has become a police state, and it’s rapidly getting worse. Everything and everyone is suspected and monitored. Marcus decides to fight for his rights.\n<\/p>\n
\nI believe this is an important topic: the book would be a decent introduction to the security vs. civil liberties debate, for some part of the target young adult audience. But it’s not a particularly good book. First of all, it’s way too black-and-white, even for teenagers. And Doctorow is so focused on delivering his message that he overlooks the importance of having a good story – or good characters. It’s a polemic lecture rather than a novel: Doctorow makes it all too serious (in a bad way) and loses the fun.\n<\/p>\n
\nI’m mostly OK with Marcus being smart and hard-working and idealistic, but when you add his perfect goal-oriented efficiency and then make him spout speeches as well, he becomes something of an unlikely construct. The other characters are bare outlines: simplistic, with no development. All the young people, the good guys, sound the same: smoothly hip.\n<\/p>\n
\nNot a bad book really but not something I’d recommend, except to people who’d read it because they already agree with Doctorow and want to get all riled up about the topic.\n<\/p>\n
\nFree download at craphound.com<\/a>, Amazon UK<\/a>, Amazon US<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A seventeen-year-old boy ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time (near a major terrorist attack on San Francisco). Angry men push him into a DHS van and take him to an interrogation facility. He tries to be principled, refusing to unlock his phone etc, but soon surrenders to the interrogators’ will. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[77,205,80,204],"class_list":["post-843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book_review","tag-cory_doctorow","tag-fiction","tag-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=843"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1348,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843\/revisions\/1348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}