Pirate Cinema

November 26, 2012
In Doctorow’s novel set in the not too distant future, 16-year-old Trent McCauley gets his family in big trouble due to his unrepentant Internet piracy. With things going badly at home and the family banned from the Internet, Trent opts to run away to London, where he learns to live on the streets. In this audio edition, narrator Bruce Mann—whose native British accent is ideal for the story—does his best to embody Trent but turns in a middling performance. Though his interpretations of the supporting characters, particularly Trent’s mother, are believable and understated, the majority of his reading sounds forced and unnatural. At times it sounds as if he’s reading rather than performing. Mann seems unable to really let himself get lost within the story, and because of his reading listeners will suffer the same fate. Ages 12–up. A Tor hardcover.

August 27, 2012
Doctorow (Little Brother; For the Win) returns with another down-and-dirty tale of technological guerrilla warfare. Set in a near-future England where Big Entertain-ment is pressuring Parliament into criminalizing illicit downloading and handing out jail sentences to those who do it, the novel concerns 16-year-old Trent McCauley who obsessively samples old films to create new works of art. This gets his entire family barred from the Web for a year, rendering his parents virtually unemployable and derailing his sister's education. Running away to London, Trent falls in with a group of young, high-tech squatters and anarchists who begin a David vs. Goliath war against the establishment, hoping to free the Net for creative use by the common people. Doctorow, a noted free Internet advocate (and PW columnist), handles his topic with great passion, creating engaging and believably geeky characters who share his fervor for both the Web and the new forms of art and communication it has made possible. Though the story can be talky and didactic, fans of the author's earlier work will find it a winner. Ages 13âup. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.