Actual rating: 3.5 
 Poor Sydney Carton. He's got a hard Knox life. Yes, I wrote this entire review just so I could work "hard Knox life" into it somehow. 
 Remember reading The Whipping Boy in grade school? Remember how much you hated the fact that life could be so unfair? Well, get ready to be even more bitter towards life in this YA dystopian version of it. 
 This has a plot, but I think it doubles as a social commentary and satire about our culture and how it is devolving. It's about consumerism, debt, the unfairness of social classes. Born to a rich family? Awesome. Born into debt? Tough shit. Deal with it. Things are not going to get better, and in any case, it's your fault for being born poor anyway. Seriously, that's how things are in this future. Forget Albert Camus, forget George Orwell; I think I became more depressed reading this book and interpreting its bleak messages than I ever was reading Nineteen Eighty Four. I think the social overtures overshadow the characters, and that's actually a good thing because I found very little to actually like about the characters, which might actually be the message all along. 
 The future in this book is pretty damn bleak. We hear a lot about social disparity these days, how the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. I don't know if there are only the two distinct social classes in this book's version of a dystopian future, but we only see things from two points of view, the very rich and the very poor, the Upper City and the Lower City. In the future, the world is controlled by debt, consumerism, targeted advertisements. It is a thinly veiled parody of what the author feels our world is coming to. Contracts, debts, "if contracts couldn't be enforced, the system would collapse. Contractual agreements, they all learned from the first day of school, were all that stood between civilization and a return to the age of chaos. Trying to delete a debt was like trying to destroy the world." 
 Our behavior is tracked, every purchase goes into a personal database, poor kids have installations into their "biofeed," a system installed within your blood, that sends them ads based on personal behavior and prior purchases. Think Amazon interest-based ads in hyperdrive. Advertising. All. The. Time. Your body is merely a network. 
 If you are born poor, or an abandoned orphan, tough shit. You are literally born with debt. "The Benevolent Society charged ten years for a 'rescue' from the desert and another three for installing the datastream into your blood. Three more years got tacked on for foster care, and two more just to get into school. That made eighteen altogether. Syd knew that eighteen years of debt well. He had it himself." All Sydney ever wanted is to stay under the radar, work off his debt, and just be an anonymous drone among many. "He didn't like mattering at all. He longed for the carefully constructed anonymity, the world of not mattering to anyone that he'd spent a lifetime building and seen crumble in only one day." Thanks to his Patron, he doesn't even get that much. Welcome to the future! 
 Sydney is a bit of a martyr; for a guy who's trying to just get by, he takes too much upon himself, and he's more soft-hearted and optimistic than he should have been given his status. I expected a savvy street rat, I got a kid with too much humanity, too much guilt, who blames himself for any misfortune that befalls the people he cares about. Still, I felt so bad for him, and he is such a sad character. Take the first time he was punished for Knox's misdeeds, at the grand old age of five. 
 "She asked him some question he didn't understand about credits and debt and that was the first time he heard the words 'proxy' and 'patron'; all he remembered clearly after that was the pain of the shocks she gave him, one, two, three, four, five, like his skin was being burned off from the inside and he cried and cried. 
 It took him about a year to stop crying when he was punished, and another year to understand that he wasn't being punished for anything that he did. He came to believe he was being punished simply for being born." 
 If you are born wealthy, then you are a Patron, with a Proxy to take your punishment for you. The Proxy is a kid with debts to pay, in this case, Sydney Carton is Knox's Proxy. The theory is that the Patron must watch his Proxy being punished, and therefore learn to behave from seeing another's pain on his behalf. Surely, after over 10 years of seeing his poor Proxy suffer from being EMD shocked (similar to Tasered) and punished in various other ways would cure Knox's disobedience and make him into a better, more considerate human being. 
 Nope. 
 Knox is irredeemably unsympathetic. A spoiled, rich kid. A surprisingly brilliant hacker considering he doesn't do much studying besides close scrutiny of girls' anatomy. He does anything he wants, with the full knowledge that his proxy will take his punishments. The way he sees it, it's his prerogative to take advantage of all that's offered him. I think the author tries to make Knox into a somewhat more sympathetic character because he still mourns his mother's death. But no, not at all. All I see throughout the book, and Knox really does not change much, is a cliched poor-little-rich-boy. His father ignores him for work, so he acts out. According to Knox, nothing is his fault. It was his luck in life to be born wealthy, and it is his privilege to enjoy it. It's Sydney's fault that he's got so much debt (never mind that Sydney got into debt just for being born), so he's got to put up with it, it's just the system, it's just the way things work. Knox has no sympathy for anyone, and honestly, I can't rummage up a bit of love or even like for him, when he tries and fails to feel a little bit of anything. 
 "'He wanted to tell her yes, now he believed. He wanted to tell her he believed what she believed because maybe then she'd hold his hand, maybe then she'd smile back and remind him who he used to be. But he didn't believe and he didn't say yes. He just couldn't fake it. Instead, he shrugged. 'I guess it doesn't matter either way.'" 
 There are other characters in the book who feel like a parody of today's first-world activist, a wealthy girl who takes on causes and believes overly in her own self-importance, a "Causegirl." None are altogether likeable or memorable. The plot itself is secondary to the social criticism and moral tones, and got to be more than a little ridiculous and completely unbelievable at times. Read it for what it is, a social commentary, and not for the plot.