Product: 0307711544

In the near future, high school senior Marcus Yallow and his friends are caught near the scene of a terrorist attack in San Francisco and apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security. After some rough interrogation, Marcus is released, but there is no sign of his friend Darryl. In the aftermath of the attacks, numerous new security restrictions are imposed on San Francisco, and Marcus starts to resist them by setting up a secure Linux network that runs off of hacked XBox consoles, and using that network to spread ideas of ways to subvert the restrictions. He also learns that Darryl may still be alive and starts searching for ways to find out what happened to him.

This is an entertaining novel, but I wanted to like it more than I actually did. I agree with a lot of the ideas presented about the value of freedom, and those are especially important for the young adult audience this book is aimed at, and the various hacks that Marcus pulls off are interesting, but a lot of the information is given in the form of clunky infodumps which interrupt the story. Also, the views of anyone opposing Marcus are presented as fairly simplistic, straw man arguments. The government officials are just caricatures who don’t even have a legitimate interest in the country’s security, they just want to accumulate power. Despite, those flaws, it is still a novel worth reading that is very relevant to today’s world.
Rating: 4
0307711544
Count: 7