Foot--Little Brother: Chapters 1-8

I dove into Little Brother, didn't read the back cover or inside flap, just decided to start and see what it was about. At first, I struggled a little but once I met the characters and got a sense of who they were, I didn't want to put it down. The introduction of characters is vital to me. If you leave me wondering what's going on or who is whom then it's really hard for me to keep wanting to read, but this book gave a good description of each of the kids. Here is the description of Van. "Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, with straight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she researches on the net. She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and she loves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack together when she dances" (Doctorow 29). This extensive description allows me to form a picture in my mind and I love that. So far, the detail that Doctorow has shown is perfect for helping a student visualize the novel.

Not knowing what to expect, I was totally shocked to find Marcus and his four friends being kidnapped. I had predicted the whole book to be about a group of friends going on a mission to solve the game Harajuku Fun Madness. When I was struck wrong, I realized that reading what the book was about might have been a good idea. That reminded me of the activities we have done in Dr. Pytash's class on introducing your readers to a text. Sometimes it is best to connect their lives with the book and I think this book would be very easy to connect with students lives these days because they are so immersed with technology. Perhaps, you could have students come up with their own ideas of making a new and improved technology or creating something that would make their lives easier and then introduce the book, where a boy and his friends decide to make their own inventions in a extremely technologically advanced world. 

I realize this book is fiction and so it's not supposed to be true but sometimes I wish the technology tricks seemed a little more realistic. It's like I'm reading along about a boy in school with a family in San Francisco, which all seems real to me and then suddenly he is microwaving a book or switching numbers on FasTrak tags. Maybe I should believe more in the impossible, but regardless it's a great start.