Little Brother Book Review

There are a lot of things about Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother that I have trouble with.  The protagonist, for example.  Marcus Yallow is a whiny, entitled, l33t-speaking, snotty little high-schooler who creates his own problems and then gets all butthurt when he has to deal with the consequences of his actions.  I read the first several chapters excitedly, wondering when this guy was going to get his comeuppance, before it slowly dawned on me that this guy was the hero, the one we were supposed to be rooting for.  Without giving too much away, I will say that eventually you end up having to root for Marcus as the people he's fighting against descend further and further into the type of villainy that you normally only find in Saturday morning cartoons, but I held out as long as possible, hoping that someone more likable came along.
    Another issue is the pacing of the book.  Doctorow uses an unwieldy mix of fiction and fact, a technique that can yield impressive results when done correctly.  Unfortunately, it's not really done very well here, with the fictional story getting abruptly interrupted by pages and pages of marginally related technobabble.  It also makes me confused about who the target audience of the book is.  Most of the fictional stuff seems like it was written for high schoolers, but some of the technical stuff is dense and complicated enough that I just skipped over it after the third sentence that read something like "Just plug the QXF84 drives into the DIPHOS generator and then arphids!"  While Doctorow certainly provides thorough explanations of the technologies he uses in his book, as well as how to use them yourself, the descriptions he provides are probably too technical for the average high school student. 
    Despite all this, I didn't completely hate the book.  The first third of the story, which deals with a terrorist attack on San Francisco and a group of teenagers swept up by the overzealous security measures that follow, is actually pretty compelling.  There are still grey areas in this section, where it's still possible to rationalize the events of the story.  Doctorow has a tendency to get overexcited, though, so the characters get bigger and broader and less believable throughout the book until they're all practically just shrieking archetypes, the hero and the villain and the girlfriend and the parents becoming paint-by-numbers characters without leaving you much to remember them by. 
    If you are for some reason forced to read this book, it will not give you cancer.  It's not even going to be the worst thing you'll ever have to read, especially not if schools are still requiring you to read "The Pearl."  But all in all, my favorite thing about this book is that eventually it ended and then I didn't have to read it anymore.  Also, it's available for free on the internet (which is very cool, by the way.  10 points for Doctorow), so I didn't have to pay for it.  I guess it's kind of like a cake submerged in a swimming pool filled with fiberglass: it's got some interesting information and a good moral about protecting one's privacy, but you've got to wade through a lot of irritating things to get to it.