In Real Life

This review contains spoilers!

Cory Doctorow is so optimistic. As a white cis male, he's more likely to have his voice heard and not be attacked for his gender or race. He does pretty well when he's fighting for women in gaming, and this book really shows that - the protagonist is a young girl and many of the other characters are women gamers. They're part of an all-female guild, in order to raise awareness of women gamers and help other women to stop being afraid of using female avatars. So this is a story set in a similarly sexist world to our own, and the protagonists are women making things better for women. Awesome. Unfortunately, Doctorow is apparently still totally cool with the white saviour narrative. The main character Anda meets a gold farmer in the game, a Chinese kid named Raymond who has health problems and no insurance, and is treated poorly by his employer. Anda does a bunch of research to find clinics near him (which for some reason he was unable to do himself?) and encourages him to start a union. Which he tries, and is fired for. Anda feels terrible (I'm sure Raymond feels pretty shitty too but we're not really looking at his story, are we?) and doesn't know what to do. There's a good scene when Anda finds out that Raymond was fired from a different gold farmer. He yells at her about how you (Americans) think you know everything about us because you read about us on the internet, but you don't know anything about what our lives are really like. At which point I was like, yeah, exactly, I hope this goes somewhere good, but then Anda was like, I don't know what it's like for you but I do know what it's like to be a kid who loves games! and then it went downhill from there. Anda and her American buddies passed around a note from Raymond to the other gold farmers about unions, and for SOME REASON NEVER EXPLAINED, NOW everyone is willing to approach their employer about health insurance. So, yes, the second note was a call to arms from a fellow (ex-)worker, but without American influence, they all would have just sat around ignorant of unions and dying without health insurance? Anyway, Anda is vindicated, especially when Raymond shows up back in the game with a fancy new avatar blah blah blah.
The art is lovely and the story is nice until it's problematic. I'd probably have given it 3 stars if I hadn't been looking forward to it.