I listened to the first parts of this as Doctorow was reading it on his podcast; the spacing out between chunks was distracting me and making it hard to follow, so I ultimately bought an epub (harder to download than it should have been) and restarted the story. Then, I took a two-day break near the end of the book—all of this to say that I wonder if I would have liked it even more if I’d read straight through.

It’s not the tightest story or Doctorow’s best, but it hits a lot of his regular points: be smart about security, watch out for law enforcement and corporate overreach, and this is what activism looks like when done properly. I knew shamefully little about the water protector scene and was especially glad to learn some about that. It does what Doctorow books always do: radicalize me a little more by making me feel some righteous anger. Glad I read it.

• Spill
• Cory Doctorow
• Little Brother series
• activism