I didn't get it
I truly do appreciate this book. I truly do. Nancy Farmer has a gift for creativity and I'm in love with the way she makes a blend of culture, sci-fi, and morality. This is a complex and thought-provoking novel, written quite well.

That said, I still did not like it.

It's dark, severe, grating, and hard-to-swallow. Which works well for many a book, but I'm afraid that it only made the end of this book all the more cheesy. And this is one top of the bizarre family connections.

There's an icy feeling that connects almost all the characters, and I don't think Ms. Farmer properly escaped it in time to leave one satisfied.

Thank-you, Ms. Farmer, for putting such incredible concepts into a YA book with your talented writing, but please do not expect everyone to enjoy this.

Though I'm sure the right crowd will love it. I do not complain against its awards

The House of The Scorpion
I made Scorpion part of my advanced summer reading program because of its description and the awards it has won. The story is about the life of a boy who is a clone of a drug-lord. I think the book won the awards for the issues it raises such as morality, cloning, and prejudice rather then the quality of story or writing. I found the characters uninteresting especially the dialog. The writing did not transport me to this foreign location and time period. Overall I found the book a chore to complete. I recommend some of my other summer choices: The Book Thief, Octavian Nothing, To Kill a Mockingbird and Skellig. I really felt House of the Scorpion was a waste of my time.

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.

my critique
at the end of my freshman year of highschool we had to clean out our lockers. this book had been on our required reading list so many kids had bought it. i must have picked up 6 copies that were about to be trashed...my plan was to sell them on ebay **sigh**.

anyways...im not going to be boring and tell you what happens, because there are 31 boring pages of reviews that do that. and im not going to try and imitate book reviewers like all these other people did. so, read the classic phrases, like, "page turner", "couldnt put it down" someplace else.

im pretty sure that nancy farmers pyschologist diagnosed her with ADD after this book was written. wow...she cant stay on subject. the book starts out pretty good, but has no qualms about meandering into mediocraty. the timing is just awful. she tried to accomplish too much, and poorly developed the story.

in school they told us about something called a climax. maybe someone should have told mrs. farmer what that means. the last hundred pages are just cheating. she dumps direction the book is going in and sets us off on a bizarre, pointless trip to an orphanage where she starts ratting off communism. i know, i know, it doesnt make much sense. from here the book is filled with mediocre stereotypes that has absolutely no place in the story that i had been reading. while she was writing this trite part her publisher called her and said that she only had 380 pages to work with. oops...so she hits the fastforward button, speeding to the close, and arriving at the finish line with a puzzling ending.

the concept was good, but she changed styles and purpose so many times that in the end we're left with a pretty unsatisfying experience. i think that pretty much everyone who read it will agree with me that she should have made the part where he went to give the old guy his heart the climax. after that i felt like i was just reading to finish it. the story was over....the whole thing with his girlfriend and her mother was just very unliterary. there were like, four weird mother in law jokes at the end that didnt help anything.

her scramblings to tie up all loose ends throughout the book was admirable...her shortcomings too blatantly obvious to even warrant time being discussed. and then, 2 pages from the finish she decided that matt scoring 6-6 (fortune, girl, acceptance into civilazation, friends, mother, freeing eejets) would be a little silly. so she killed off the scottish father figure. his comical death was stretching just a little bit...she tried to explain it, but it must have been hard sense she didnt seem to understand it either.

the pressing moral and eithical sociological question of whether or not clones were equal to humans was solved, typically rushed and anticlaimatic, buried somewhere in midparagraph that was intended to make everything okay at the end.

okay, well i think ive rambled enough, if you want more ramblings, read the house of the scorpion...

Amazing book for even the most conservative readers
This book is simply amazing--fluidly well told, with none of the typical "coming of age" tawdry sexualization, no offensive language, just an interesting take on contemporary issues. The realistic characters and well-paced story make this book worthy of all the awards it garnered. Buy your kid this book--then read it yourself!