LITTLE BROTHER

By Cory Doctorow

One fateful day after Marcus has skipped out of school using a variety of tricks to dodge the school's security system, terrorists blow up the San Fransisco Bay Bridge. Marcus and his friends just happen to be in the wrong part of town when it happens, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers swoop down upon them and carry them off to an undisclosed detention center. There, Marcus, Van, Darryl, and JoLu are bound, interrogated, and generally intimidated and humiliated into disclosing information about their phones, laptops, and other high-tech gadgets in their possession before being released several days later. Darryl had been injured during the initial terrorist attack, and was not released with his three friends. Marcus believes the worst, that Darryl has died in jail. Back at home, his parents have obviously had a bad few days, not knowing where he had been, but Marcus decides it is safer not to tell the truth. Besides, sometime during a torture session at the detention center, he had vowed to himself that he would pay DHS back for everything they had done to him. He can do that more easily if he keeps his parents in the dark. Marcus is one smart, tech-savvy kid, and soon has a virtually untraceable online network set up to spread the word about what had happened to him, and to plan and coordinte acts of sabotage against the DHS. Marcus's new handle, M1k3y, Little Brother, is born, and he becomes the reluctant leader of the free underground world.

This is a post 9-11 story about government gone crazy. The conflict is between two philosophies--the one that says it's OK to trample on people's civil rights if that's what it takes to keep citizens safe, and the one that says that only truly free people can ever be safe. In light of recent disclosures about torture and interrogation practices our government has sanctioned in recent years, this novel couldn't be more timely and thought-provoking. Here's what I don't like about this novel. As fascinating as the technological and political themes of this book are, I struggle to endorse it fully, because of the nonchalant way it treats teenage sex and alcohol use in several scenes in the story. Not a good message in that respect. Little Brother is on next year's Tayshas reading list .

--reviewed by Dail Sams--

Wintergirls

by Laurie Halse Anderson

Laurie Halse Anderson has written another heart-wrenching story about a girl sinking into the despair of anorexia. Told in first person, the reader can't help but see this illness through Lia's eyes, as she spirals out of control following the death of her best friend, Cassie, who was also anorexic. Lia inhabits a dark, cold place where self-loathing permeates her being and where every bite of food she takes is really a number of calories, begrudged, because she just doesn't deserve to nourish herself. As her weight drops, she deludes herself into believing that she is a wintergirl, strong and powerful because she hasn't given in to the lure of eating. She is constantly haunted by ghosts, especially Cassie's ghost, and finally it is that haunting, and the love of her younger step-sister that gives her the tiniest desire to live. Wintergirls is a precisely written, accurately researched, and frighteningly realistic work which should be read by every teenaged girl and by those who work or live with them.

~reviewed by Dail Sams