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A review by thewallflower00
For the Win by Cory Doctorow
2.0
After Doctorow's last YA effort, Little Brother, I was really looking forward to his next. I should not have been.
"For the Win" is character soup. They're all foreign people. And while I have no problem reading about foreign people, it give me problems finding the sympathetic character to identify with. I'll be the first to say it -- I'm not interested in reading about East Indian or Korean gold farmers. There's nothing for me, an American audience, to hang a hat on. The people in these books obsessively play MMORPG's. They're sick. They need help, not encouragement.
This is a novel that's more interested in economics and politics than in the characters it's describing. Economics is a mystery to me, and it always will be. I have no interest in it, even though I should. To me, it's magic. And not the good kind of magic that Merlin uses. It's the "any sufficiently advanced something is indistinguishable from magic" that Arthur C. Clarke uses. I think all the youth of America agrees with me that economics + young adult = you're going to have trouble finding an audience while the next Twilight book is sharing your shelf space. This is now my least favorite Doctorow book.
"For the Win" is character soup. They're all foreign people. And while I have no problem reading about foreign people, it give me problems finding the sympathetic character to identify with. I'll be the first to say it -- I'm not interested in reading about East Indian or Korean gold farmers. There's nothing for me, an American audience, to hang a hat on. The people in these books obsessively play MMORPG's. They're sick. They need help, not encouragement.
This is a novel that's more interested in economics and politics than in the characters it's describing. Economics is a mystery to me, and it always will be. I have no interest in it, even though I should. To me, it's magic. And not the good kind of magic that Merlin uses. It's the "any sufficiently advanced something is indistinguishable from magic" that Arthur C. Clarke uses. I think all the youth of America agrees with me that economics + young adult = you're going to have trouble finding an audience while the next Twilight book is sharing your shelf space. This is now my least favorite Doctorow book.