Little Brother (Doctorow, Cory) 2008

Good book.  For the first few chapters, I had the feeling that an "old person" was trying to appropriate my generation's voice**, it's obviously not intended in a bad way, but it just feels a little condescending when a geezer is trying to be slick.  Once he's finally finished trying to establish his young hacker cred, Doctorow gets down to just writing about universal human needs and conflicts that happen to be wrapped within a near-future teen hacker's world, and it's a compelling read.  


Still, the single best page comes early, when he gives an excellent one-line definition of LARPing: "It's like Capture the Flag in monster-drag, with a bit of Drama Club thrown in."  And later goes on to explain, "The problem with [LARPing in] hotels is that they have a lot of nongamers in them, too [...].  Normal people.  From states that begin and end with vowels.  On holidays.  / And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game. / Let's just leave it at that, okay?"  Brilliant.


I got the distinct impression that Van was originally to be Marcus's love interest, but Doctorow decided against that after an early draft and created the character of Ange, possibly while he was plotting the aftermath of the VampMob and how Marcus would get his last infodrop to the press.  The tracks are covered reasonably well, but Van and Ange go to the same school, Van has an unrequited crush on Marcus, and there's a typo on page 183 of hardcover edition that says "Van was really excited by this party" when clearly it should be Ange.  


** even though I'm just a year younger than Cory Doctorow and not at all part of the generation whose voice he's writing in.  I'd be a geezer appropriating another generation's voice if I were writing this kind of book.

Finished reading 3/25/10.