Someone Leaves Town

It's time to prove how much better I am than you. I've read a book!

: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
by Cory Doctorow.

And now I'm going to review it. A book review in a blog, old media being digested by the new, audiences put to sleep in newer and more dynamic ways. Spoilers abound.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow. The first thing that grabbed me was the Da Vinci Codesque cover, which I saw on Amazon (naturally). That manuscript passage running along the bottom isn't Jesus telling his slaves how to build the Sphinx, but it's actually the first paragraph of the book. How's that for artsy wankery.

I had read another book by Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom, and I swear I had never read such crap in my life. I had it in the toilet and it took me two months to get through it, not because it was a difficult read but because I kept making excuses not to read it. That's right, I'd rather stare at the calendar from 2003 than finish that book.

So how does Someone Comes to Town compare with that effort? Well, anything would be an improvement, but Someone is a really good read. Like every good book that I read, the thing that keeps me going is the depth of the characters. There's about a dozen well fleshed out people in this book, each of them making their own subplots readable.

Those characters. Where do I start? Seven brothers, each with a superhuman power, born to a mountain and a washing machine. A woman with wings, torn from her equally winged community to try and make a go of it in the real world. A guy who wants to cover a city with free wireless Internet with stuff he pulls out of dumpsters. Some of the characters float aimlessly, others are driven, all are interesting. It's hard to relate to any of the characters as they're all so different from the norm, but who wants to read about us anyway? Imagine an X-Men movie, but replace teen angst with middle aged hopelessness.

The reviews that I read of this book before buying it were mixed. Some people accused Cory Doctorow of not taking the characters seriously. The seven brothers have no stable names, they frequently change to other names starting with the same letter. The winged girl on the cover is never actually named! Maybe they're right, but they're his characters and he can maroon them on an island for three seasons if he wants to.

Speaking of Lost, this book is filled with flashbacks. Normally that would piss me right off, but some characters only exist in the past and it's necessary to experience the events that made the characters what they are. You'd think a book about unrelatable freaks peppered with seemingly unpunished murders would be unbelievable at best. Despite the children being raised by golems (!), despite one of the brothers being an island (!), despite another of the brothers unknowingly moving next door to the only person in the world who can detect his kind, it all works.

And here's the best part, you my special little poppets can read it for free. The book has been licenced under Creative Commons (as is Boredomistan) and is free to download. There's even an RSS version and all kinds of fancy crap.

I give it four Yahoo! Mail icons that I stole from the Yahoo! homepage.

I've mentioned the The Da Vinci Code. Watch my Google rankings soar. If you have no intention of buying or reading the book, highlight the empty space below and I'll spoil the ending for you.

Brother B abuses his power to manipulate his brothers lives for his own amusement, killing the ones he doesn't like. The wireless Internet scheme is a success. The winged girl learns to fly (awww), and she flies all the way to a better life (awww).

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