I’m posting this from Madison, but wrote most of it in O’Hare, where I was stuck for a few hours about a week and a half ago (cancelled flight, waiting for a delayed connection, blah blah blah).

It’s been a busy month, first with travel to LA (for Sandbox), and then Boston. I logged a fair number of flights (for me, at least), and to pass the time, I’ve been dipping back into young adult fiction. They’re easy enough to read and fun enough for a plane, plus I get a weird little kick out of when adults recognize what I’m reading (more people are reading these kinds of books than I thought) and when kids recognize what I’m reading — frankly, this hasn’t happened too often, so maybe I’m reading the kind of YA fiction that only adults actually read.

I’m not reading Where the Red Fern Grows, but have been reading some of the contemporary geek fiction written for young adults. In the past few weeks, that’s been So Yesterday by Scott Westerfield, and Little Brother by boingboing’s own Cory Doctorow. Both are worth reading, both are good books, and both are recommended. Here are a couple of brief reviews:

So Yesterday

I’d bought this a year or two ago, but had always found reasons not to read it. It appeared to about teenage “cool hunters” — which seemed rather implausible to me at first glance — and their wacky adventures hunting cool stuff in New York City. This is, actually, what the book is about (sort of), but it’s much more fun, and much more subversive than I expected.

Basically, the story follows a cool hunter (someone who tips off corporations to hot new youth culture trends) and his budding trendsetting girlfriend as they try to track down what happened to the cool hunter’s contact in the biz (a Nike employee), who has mysteriously disappeared. What happens throughout the book is that the entire enterprise of cool hunting gets dealt with critically by the protagonists — questioning the point of helping corporations such as Nike with marketing trends back to kids, plus the role of “culture jamming.”

It was quite a fun, short read, and one that I’d definitely recommend to any kid who is dying to have the latest, greatest products. I mean that slightly snidely — as a wannabe hipster teenager, I was enamored by the latest gadgets, weird ways of tying one’s shoes, and clothing (though nowhere nearly as much as some kids today). Getting kids to understand the bigger picture (how kids are marketed to, why, and how trends propagate) seems a good idea.

Little Brother

I’d seen some of Doctorow’s blog posts on boingboing about this book within the past year, but only after reading Westerfield’s book did I decide to go out and but Little Brother. I’ll admit that I’m very conflicted about Doctorow’s books — he blatantly rips off (or “homages”?) better science fiction writers (e.g., John Varley in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the title of Little Brother an obvious reference to Orwell), and his writing style always feels like it needs another two or three edits to tighten things up (did he need to use the phrase “stocking feet” so often in Little Brother?).

That said, I really grew to love Little Brother. Naming the protagonist “m1k3y” (a la “Mike,” the AI in Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) pretty much indicates Doctorow’s goals here, and it seems like this is ultimately his contemporary manual for revolution masquerading as a fun scifi book (though, to be honest, it’s barely SF; the tech used in it is basically available now). He wants kids to pick up this book, look critically at the privacy and human rights violations of the past decade, and then go out and do something about it. A laudable goal, and one which really shines through the whole book — whether it’s on how to set up clandestine, encrypted network using hacked gaming consoles, or how to take LARPing and ARGs and turn them into political tools, the book illustrates plausible and interesting modes of resistance using staples of nerd culture.

And, rather than spoil, I’ll just politely dodge the content of the ending. I’ll say that I found “m1k3y”’s predicament in the final chapters a bit shocking to read in a young adult novel, but strangely refreshing at the same time. Rarely have I seen a book (let alone a kids’ book) that deals with the contemporary issues of torture and government impropriety one would see in the real world during a war crimes tribunal. The book’s not without its flaws (Doctorow’s writing style really bugs me at times), but these criticisms are far outweighed by the importance of the book’s message. Young adults should be encouraged to look at the last decade of privacy and human rights violations, and empowered to do what they can to resist them using the tools they know best.

So, these were both a couple of fun, interesting teen novels to check out at the end of the summer, while providing more substance than most expect from young adult literature. Both novels take just a few hours to read, and both are worthwhile for adults, as well. (If you’re cheap, click here and you can read Little Brother in its entirety online).