Little Brother

A quick & easy read. A bit heavy-handed with the anti-government rhetoric - but that's easily forgiven as it is the point of the story. The characters, while not strongly rendered, are fun to follow on their (mis)adventures and the technical jargon is not too overwhelming. Truthfully, I'm a computer person so the explanations of things like cryptography and coding were familiar ground. Anyone not versed in these things might find those sections boring or confusing, although I think the breakdowns were straight-forward enough for anyone to understand - if perhaps somewhat unnecessary to the storyline.

Though rather clumsily handled at times, I did enjoy Doctorow's use of Socratic style conversations between characters to argue both sides of the issues presented in the book. Marcus' father was a fun foil that helped bring out both sides of the public safety vs. privacy intrusions issue. On the other hand, Marcus's classmate Charles, was just too hiss-able of an adversary to be believable. Still, the sheer geekiness of the tale was fun to experience.