Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
"Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
"It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you.
"They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to my cell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rules all my life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because I'd snuck out of school."

San Francisco techno-geek teen Marcus Yallow (aka "w1n5t0n") and his three friends find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Having all snuck out of their respective schools to get a head start on tracking down the latest clue in their favorite Alternative Reality Game -- Harajuku Fun Madness -- for which they are teammates, they are picked up by the Department of Homeland Security in the immediate aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, transported to a secret prison, and kept in isolation:

"'Am I under arrest?' "'You're going to have to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now.' She didn't say, 'or else,' but it was implied.
"'I would like to contact an attorney,' I said. 'I would like to know what I've been charged with. I'd like to see some form of identification from both of you.'
"The two agents exchanged looks.
"I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,' severe haircut lady said. 'I think you should do that right now. We found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don't look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. Now what is this for?'
"'You think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!'
"'Just the right age -- Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly stuff on the public Internet.
"'I would like to speak to an attorney,' I said.
"Severe haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. 'You're under the mistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for a crime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a potential enemy combatant by the government of the United States. If I were you. I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very deep dark holes, holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. I want you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do you know about the attack on this city?'
"'I'm not going to unlock my phone for you,' I said, indignant. My phone's memory has all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, little hacks and mods I'd installed. 'That's private stuff.'
"'What have you got to hide?'
"'I've got the right to my privacy,' I said. 'And I want to speak to an attorney.'
"'This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don't have anything to hide.'
"'I want to speak to an attorney.' My parents would pay for it. All the FAQs on getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to see an attorney, no matter what they say or do. There's no good that comes of talking to the cops without your lawyer present. Those two said they weren't cops, but if this wasn't an arrest, what was it?
"In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them."

Marcus is eventually released, but it is made quite clear to him that he will be picked up and will disappear for good if he says a word to anyone at all about where he has been or what he has been through. Marcus -- who has paid attention during his American government classes -- decides that the Bill of Rights should not be optional and that he must use his techno-talents to anonymously mobilize his fellow teenagers in order to take on the out-of-control U.S. government.

LITTLE BROTHER is an incredibly smart, unbelievably tense thriller. While reading its 365 pages, there was not a single instance when I knew what was going to happen next.

What is most scary about the story is that it is set in the very-near future and that so many of the tech tools, hacks, and mods that Marcus Yallow utilizes or decries are for real. (I googled many of them and, sure enough, there they were!) If you are not familiar with author Cory Doctorow, he has long been involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is an editor at BoingBoing. This guy knows technology and related privacy issues like nobody's business.

Given the unrelenting power of this story and considering that we are at a time in our history when our elected representatives are debating the right of the President to circumvent the requirements of obtaining a court order in order to spy on large numbers of American citizens -- aka ME and YOU -- this is surely going to be one of the ultimate must have/must read teen books of 2008.

"Don't trust anyone over thirty." -- Jerry Rubin

Back in 1971, my adolescent sensibilities were rocked off of their foundations by my exposure to PICTURES AT A PROSECUTION: DRAWINGS AND TEXTS FROM THE CHICAGO CONSPIRACY TRIAL by Jules Feiffer. You can bet your Xbox that there are going to be teens today who will grow up and think back to the moment when someone hooked them up with Cory Doctorow's ground-breaking LITTLE BROTHER.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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