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In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco - an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.
A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus's hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It's incendiary stuff - and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.
Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him - but he can't admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He's surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can't even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He's not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he's gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they're used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.
Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother - a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.
"Fans of Little Brother and the author's other stories of technophiliac hacktivism ought to love this book." - Publishers Weekly
"Outstanding for its target audience, and even those outside Doctorow's traditional reach may find themselves moved by its call to action." - Kirkus
"Doctorow is the ultimate crossover author, whose sharp writing and take on today's (and tomorrow's) hot-button political and technological issues engage YA and adult readers alike." - Library Journal
This information about Homeland was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Matt Locke
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger, as well as the coeditor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults including Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. The former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cofounder of the U.K. Open Rights Group, he lives in London.
Link to Cory Doctorow's Website
Name Pronunciation
Cory Doctorow: DOCK-tor-oh
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