Caught in the Net (Lightbringer Series)

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Summary: Excellent Young Adult Satire on Media Monopolies
Review: RACING THROUGH THE TIMES is Ron DeBoer's sequel to RETURNING LIGHT TO THE WIND (ISBN 0969885504)in the Lightbringer Series for Young Adult readers. With RACING, Sarah and Dillon Lewis return and find themselves lured into an unusual newspaper called The Times, which they find in their basement. To their surprise, they find they can go backward and forward in history inside The Times. The villain, Conrad Zwart (a satire of Canadian media mogul Conrad Black, I think) is trying to buy all the newspapers in the world and wishes to re-name them The Times. The novel is told with a World War II perspective, which is really neat. For example, Comrad Zwart is an evil leader with a "little moustache." His rival is named Winston Chapel (Churchill, I think). This is a neat journey for kids to read and gets at the whole truth and interpretation of news and history.

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Summary: Final Book in Lightbringer Series The Best
Review: Ron DeBoer's final book in his Lightbringer Series of Young Adult novels about the media is the best. While in the first two books, the stories are told from a 3rd person perspective, DeBoer changes the narrative to the main character--Sarah's--voice. It works, and he should've taken this perspective for all three books. While the first book, RETURNING LIGHT TO THE WIND, took a journey into television, and the 2nd book, RACING THROUGH THE TIMES, explored newspapers, this book is a fasicinating journey into the Internet. Like all the books, the characters enter into the medium which becomes a physical space. In CAUGHT IN THE NET, the whole Lewis family travel into the Internet, via a special software package called Icarus2099, which turns the Lewis computer into a space ship of sorts, which they call Dedalus of mythological fame (wings). Rollad Taroproc, who represents greed--his name is a mirrored Corporate Dollar--returns in this book as a Zeus like character who has given "gifts" to the computer gods. One of these is Bill Pane, which is unmistakenly Bill Gates (Pane=Windows). The book gets a little preachy near the end about how computers are taking over the world and how TV as we know it will die, giving way to WEB TV. What an excellent contemporary book for Young Adult readers. In the end of this book, since it is the last, we also find out if Mr. and Mrs. Lewis get back together (the first book, Returning Light to the Wind begins with the separation of the Lewis parents.) Get this book, but read the others first for real enlightenment!