Steve Bookworm is spot on. This books is mind-numbingly bad. No wonder it's free on the net. I wouldn't pay for it, and if I had paid for it I would feel mugged. Even free it's not worth your time.

This book is very poorly written. The characterisation is poor and the plot is a bit of a muddle. There is no real sense of danger or purpose, and the whole thing seems a bit too geeky for me. Plus, a lot of the "computer and internet factoids", for want of a better phrase, are wrong. Also wrong is Doctorow's assumption that most people who download ebooks on the net for free don't read them because it's too much of a pain and so end up buying the book. Obviously he hasn't ever seen anybody with a PDA, an IPAQ, an ebook reader.

The story seems too derivative and a bit of a take on William Gibson. It didn't work for me at all. I found the book stone cold boring and it was a drudgery to get through. I would have stopped about 50 pages in, if not for wanting to review it.

His other assumption that teenagers will "get" this book is also wrong. No teen I know cares about the issues being raised in Little Brother. Most teens in the UK are hanging about on street corners drinking cider, taking drugs, having sex and getting into trouble. They are not all playing online geeky role playing games. And the ones who are probably wouldn't bother reading this book anyway.
I think he has his audience all wrong.

Yet again, another bad creative commons book. I've yet to read anything put out by creative commons that was any good or even half way decent.

I agree with Cheryl. This is a poor book. Despite it being written as a pastiche of Kerouac (On the road), it still reads badly. The author has managed to take a well written book and write it badly, adding a mishmash of Cthulu Mythos in an attempt to spice it up. There really is no plot structure. That's the one glaring fault above all others in this book, its structure. I couldn't finish it either. The books lets you down, and is just another example of Creative Commons putting out rubbish. I looked this book up to see what background I could get on it, and discovered, to my utter surprise, that it seems to have won awards. I notice this trend a lot lately, and have commented on it here before, awards being dished out to undeserving books. I have to say that most of the Creative Commons books are pretty bad stuff. This is yet another bad one.