The follow-up to Little Brother is more of the same—which isn’t necessarily bad. I think these would make for excellent required reading in school. The characters are a little flat, in a consistently YA way, and they’re obviously ideologues for counterculture ideas around surveillance state and what that now looks like and operates like, in the globalized, online era. I’d hazard a guess most people don’t know about the ways they can protect themselves, or why they should do so, and this book is excellent on that front.

The actual plot, though less… bombastic? to be gouache, is pretty similar to the first. The conflict exists to elucidate a particular issue. The characters relationship continues, turbulent as ever, and is tested again. Yada yada yada. These should be in school libraries and discussed, I think, as they are relevant, and free (as all of the authors works are, DRM free and I believe published in Creative Commons), and still highly relevant. It would be baffling for schools not to take advantage and they are far more pertinent than, say, Go Ask Alice, which we were made to read.