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kliberty21 's review for:
Attack Surface
by Cory Doctorow
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is the third volume of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother series, but it also serves as a standalone novel. It tells the story of Masha, who served as one of the antagonists in the first novel, Little Brother, and provided assistance to Marcus in the second, Homeland.
The story begins with Masha working for Xoth, a private company assisting a foreign government suppress protesters. After completing her work for the day aiding the authoritarian government, she moonlights by assisting a group of protestors, teaching them how to evade the monitoring.
If the first two books had Marcus as the protagonist, here we follow Masha Maximow, who was mostly “on the other side” working to help to suppress hacktivists, but at the same time supplied Marcus with sensitive data in the second book.
As the story unfolds, we see flashbacks of how Masha ended up working with Homeland Security in the first novel, then getting picked up by Carrie Johnstone (the primary antagonist in Little Brother) and back to the present.
With the back and forth between working for Xoth and Xiz and back again, it got a little confusing where in the timeline certain events were in the middle. But getting to see events from Masha's perspective really rounded out the tales told in the first book, and seeing things come to a conclusion.
While Little Brother (and Marcus' ideology) cries out "heck yeah technology!" and shows what can be done with it, Homeland shows that technology can't always be our savior. Attack Surface brings it full circle and with Masha's perspective shows that technology is simply a tool to be used. Both sides can use it, but it cannot be the only card in our deck.
The story begins with Masha working for Xoth, a private company assisting a foreign government suppress protesters. After completing her work for the day aiding the authoritarian government, she moonlights by assisting a group of protestors, teaching them how to evade the monitoring.
If the first two books had Marcus as the protagonist, here we follow Masha Maximow, who was mostly “on the other side” working to help to suppress hacktivists, but at the same time supplied Marcus with sensitive data in the second book.
As the story unfolds, we see flashbacks of how Masha ended up working with Homeland Security in the first novel, then getting picked up by Carrie Johnstone (the primary antagonist in Little Brother) and back to the present.
With the back and forth between working for Xoth and Xiz and back again, it got a little confusing where in the timeline certain events were in the middle. But getting to see events from Masha's perspective really rounded out the tales told in the first book, and seeing things come to a conclusion.
While Little Brother (and Marcus' ideology) cries out "heck yeah technology!" and shows what can be done with it, Homeland shows that technology can't always be our savior. Attack Surface brings it full circle and with Masha's perspective shows that technology is simply a tool to be used. Both sides can use it, but it cannot be the only card in our deck.