Parenthetical.net

Marcus and his too-smart-for-their-own-good punk friends are in the wrong place at a very wrong time — the destruction of the San Francisco Bay Bridge by terrorists. They get picked up by Homeland Security, taken to a secret detention facility, and abused. This experience focuses Marcus’s teen rebellion and, upon his release, he resolves to use his 133t haxx0r skillz to bring down the authoritarian new world order.

Yup, I read it, finally. (Props to Alison again for hooking me up with my galley fix.) Because I’m a contrary pain in the ass, I wanted to dislike it just because of how many times I’d been told I should loooooove it. But the truth is that I couldn’t put it down. If you are the sort of person who burned with a fire to Change the World in high school, or if you have an “If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention” bumper sticker, or if you just love intense political thrillers, you will probably love this book, too.

Doctorow does a spectacular job of imbuing the book with the creeping sense of dread that the loss of our civil rights should elicit. It’s the whole boiling-a-frog thing: the point of this book is to remind us that the temperature is being raised, and we should jump out. At the same time, it’s a damn good growing-up story populated with 3-dimension friends, parents, and new girlfriend.

This is a hacker-y, techie story, and I’d also like to hand out an extra-credit gold star for making the technology both intelligible, and a logical outgrowth of the story. (*cough*writers of TV science fiction*cough*)

It’s not perfect, for sure. While most of the good guys are real people rather than ACLU pamphlets, there aren’t any three-dimensional characters on the other side. An interviewer for The Onion AV Club asked Doctorow about this, and he said, “The other side of the equation is people who are desperately scared. I don’t mean the authoritarians who are taking advantage, but the people of good will, whom I respect, are people who are terrified.” So having Evil Villainous Authoritarians was intentional, I guess, but I still prefer my villains shaded in grey.

Slightly spoilery commentary

An even bigger issue for me was that Marcus makes some (realistically; he’s only 17, after all) bad decisions, but they aren’t coded as bad enough in the book. When your argument is based on “But I’m not a terrorist,” it helps if you don’t, you know… act like a terrorist. The Flash Mob-esque stunt at the end of the book was especially stupid, dangerous, and damn close to inciting to riot, and I didn’t feel like Marcus did enough thinking later about what was wrong with that choice.

Read-alikes: Crusader by Edward Bloor, for another teenager making tough choices to change her world; An Abundance of Katherines by John Green and Seek by Paul Fleischman, for more smart young men with smart girlfriends figuring out how to be adults; Double Helix by Nancy Werlin for both.