Little Brother

Marcus is seventeen and in the wrong place when a terrorist attack hits San Francisco. The Department of Homeland Security detains him, releases him, and then surveils him. He fights back using every technical tool he has — encryption, mesh networks, anonymizing software — and organizes his peers into a resistance movement. Doctorow wrote this as a technical manual disguised as a thriller: every hack Marcus uses is real and explained clearly enough that a teenager could replicate it. The most important YA novel about surveillance, civil liberties, and digital resistance ever written. A book that treats teenagers as people capable of understanding systems and fighting them — and then hands them the tools to do it.