books:

	The House of the Scorpion Nancy Farmer Simon Pulse, 2004 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 312 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

His DNA came from El Patrón, lord of a country called Opium -- a strip of poppy fields lying between the United States and what was once called Mexico. Matt's first cell split and divided inside a petri dish. Then he was placed in the womb of a cow, where he continued the miraculous journey from embryo to fetus to baby. He is a boy now, but most consider him a monster -- except for El Patrón. El Patrón loves Matt as he loves himself, because Matt is himself.

As Matt struggles to understand his existence, he is threatened by a sinister cast of characters, including El Patrón's power-hungry family, and he is surrounded by a dangerous army of bodyguards. Escape is the only chance Matt has to survive. But escape from the Alacrán Estate is no guarantee of freedom, because Matt is marked by his difference in ways he doesn't even suspect.

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The House of the Scorpion

For this book report I read The House of the Scorpion. The author of this book is Nancy Farmer. This book is a fantasy.
In this story there a very very old man who is 132 years old. So they make a clone of him. Its name is Matt. He stays in the house of Celia all day long. One day a group of kids come all long and Celia locks all of the doors and windows. So Matt decides to break the glass of there front door. Then he jumps out onto the glass and gets his feet, hands, and knees cut up by the glass. He goes unconscious and then he wakes up and the kids are carrying him. Then they get to this mansion and then they go inside. Then they find out that he's a clone. Then they keep him in an empty room for four years. Then he gets out and grows up and lives happily ever after.
I enjoyed reading this book because I want to find out what happen to Matt. I would recommend this book to middle school students.

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Cloning Humans Become Topical

Matt is a clone for a man who chooses not to die and is the gangster father of a huge drug cartel in Mexico. El Patron had many clones made of himself so he could use their parts for transplant of new organs. Most had their brains destroyed at birth, but one was allowed to have normal intelligence. Matt, lives with a servant for many years then moves to the "big house" where the family lives. As on many landed estates of gentry, most people are treated poorly and cater to the few. The lowest forms of life are the eejits, people who have had microchips planted in their brains so that they can only be used as slaves without complaint. Others are servants and the extended family of El Patron rule the compound. Matt, because he has normal intelligence and lives outside the normal social structure is able to break out of the bond all people are tied up in with El Patron and break free with some servants help. The story is a very exciting one and without lulls. Most chapters include a surprise and wasn't what a reader would be expecting. Nancy Farmer has done a great job and my middle school students will love this book. There is a reason the book won so many awards.

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A nice break from heavy

This was a nice one, a fast, easy, interesting read that I got to after reading a few heavy, slow-moving books. When it's taken me a week to read each of the last two books, I really need a one-day read as a pick-me-up, and that's what this was. The House of the Scorpion is a very interesting little dystopia: the drug lords of Mexico, led by one Matteo Alacran, managed to swing a deal with the US and Mexico whereby they were given the area around the border between the two countries as their own sovereign territory; in exchange, they agreed to stop completely the flow of illegal immigrants, and also promised not to sell their drugs in either nation, but go to Europe, Asia, and Africa with their product. So now, 100 years later, Matteo Alacran is still alive, owing to the fact that he keeps growing new clones of himself in order to harvest their organs. He's not unique in this, the other drug lords do the same, but what is unique is that Alacran allows his clones to retain their minds, to learn and experience life until he needs to cut them open and take their still-beating heart, so to speak. The novel is the story of the last of these clones, who goes by Matt.

The author does a nice job of portraying life as the complete outsider. She also created excellent characters for El Patron, who is the original Alacran, and Tam Lin, the IRA terrorist-cum-bodyguard who befriends little Matt. It's a nice little idea that Alacran gets his security personnel from other countries, since, as he tells Matt, that means it's harder for them to plot against him; his most recent hiring was a group of English soccer hooligans. There's also a nice idea of how the country turns the captured illegal immigrants into mindless slaves to work the fields, and I love the depiction of the Alacran family and its infighting and scandal and hatred of themselves and pretty much everyone else.

The problem, if there was any, was in the last part of the book; it's a nice little chapter in the story and it has a good resolution, but the only problem with it is that it has no connection to the rest of the book: the last section is about Communist oppression and government corruption, and the first parts of the book are not. It disappoints because the themes in the first section are so strong, so immediate -- drug cartels, illegal immigrants, cloning; it is about what makes one a human being, what makes people into a family, and also gets deep into the purpose of a nation and a government. These were all explored, all fascinating, all done with an adept touch as the book never got too profound or preachy -- and then they were all abandoned as the setting shifts. I suppose we could see the last section as offering an alternative to the nation of Opium, and trying to show that every nation has its problems, but that is rather a different idea, and not one that connects well with the other main points.

Despite my henpecking, however, the ending of the book was fine, and the first three-quarters of the book were excellent. This is a great recommendation -- especially for boys who aren't big readers, as it was recommended to me by one such. It's science fiction and action, but both are thoughtful, and neither is overwhelming.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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