A review by saidtheraina
For the Win by Cory Doctorow

3.0

This took me FOREVER to read. Over a month. Really. It's long - the ARC is 475 pages. But it's also dense. Intense lingo to learn, narrator sections. And no chapters! There are three (if I remember right) parts, and then breaks between switches in narrator. Which makes the whole book seem breathless. Which I suppose is supposed to create dramatic tension but the effect on me was just to seem overwhelmingly endless. It was one of those books I felt the need to put down after a section to think about the ideas brought up. Which is rich and cool and deep and impressive for a YA, but that combined with a crazy complicated compendium of subplots just made it kinda frustrating.
Other than that, I liked it a lot. Doctorow weaves together predictions about future evolution of gaming culture (people of all ages in all countries working to create fake revenue in online games), economics, and union issues. All things I'm fascinated by. We meet a US kid who has given himself a Chinese name, a band of street kids in India, a bunch of professional gamers in China, and a covert radio broadcaster. Oh, and an adult economist high up in Coke (who owns several of the games involved). I loved reading the individual stories, and I feel like he could have pulled out each story as part of a series of shorter volumes to greater effect.
Good. Intense. Educational. Too rich for booktalking, but great for handselling to my most voracious readers.