Little Brother – Cory Doctorow

Little Brother is a novel set in the scary near future where the Department of Homeland Security gets free reign in San Francisco after a terrorist attack.

Seventeen-year-old Marcus was just playing a game with his friends (okay,  so they all escaped school to play the game) when they were picked up in a sweep immediately after the attack.  Marcus was interrogated for days about his “involvement.”  (And when I say interrogated, I don’t mean just asked repeatedly.  I mean bound-up, not-fed, not-given-a-chance-to-use-the-bathroom, and all-around-humiliated interrogated.)  When he was released he was told he could tell no one about what happened to him.  Ever.

It was a pretty horrid attack, but living in the city afterwords is no picnic either.  Schools already had security cameras in the halls that tracked people by their gaits, just imagine what they did afterwords.  Do you think you can have a good discussion in Social Studies about the Bill of Rights? Well, you had better be careful of what you say when classrooms have cameras recording everything.

Imagine it:   you can’t get around the city without having every movement recorded,  you are repeatedly stopped and questioned, the Internet is being surveilled and the media is getting all the stories wrong.  Eventually the hackers will figure out a way to communicate.  This is that story.

Starclimber – Kenneth Oppel

Join Matt Cruse and Kate de Vries in another high flying adventure – this time the goal is space!

Matt has a summer job piloting an aerotug in Paris where France is building the Celestial Tower – a tower designed to reach all the way to outer space.  And Kate is preparing to present her talk on the aerozoans, the electrifying squid/jellyfish they encountered in Skybreaker.

All is right with the world – except when Matt becomes involved in a terrorist attack on the tower.  And then Kate receives a note from her parents recalling her to Canada for the summer.

Matt would jump at the chance to go to space, but it is likely that only French citizens will be given an opportunity at first.  The adventure really takes off when Matt and Kate are given the opportunity to join Canada’s space program by John McKinnon, the Canadian Minister of Air, and Otto Lunardi, the airship magnate who owned the Aurora (p.39).

Matt enters training to be an astralnaut, but Kate is guaranteed a spot on board the Starclimber as an expert in high-altitude life-forms.  This is the third book featuring Matt and Kate (the first being Airborn), and like the others, is an exciting read full of peril and strange new creatures.   There is a bit of politics and romance, as well.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw – Jeff Kinney

Greg is back in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw.

Poor Greg not only has to share late evening T.V. watching with his mom and younger brother, but he is forced to participate in sports.   (Do you agree with his thoughts on Shel Silverstein?)

And going to a sleepover with his friend Rowley doesn’t give Greg the chance to see the cute girl down the block,  but what can a wimpy kid do?

For information about the author and more information about the series (like book 4 is coming out October 2009), go to the official Diary of a Wimpy Kid website.

I was just digging around on his site and saw that he had originally published the first book online at Funbrain.com and it is still there.