House of the Scropion (Book Review)

The book House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer was a very interesting book in my opinion. It tells the life of a boy named Matteo Alacran and his struggles to understand himself. Because you see, Matt isn’t an ordinary boy; he is a clone of a powerful drug lord called El Patron. Matt grew up in small house in the middle of a poppy field strip in Opium, what used to be part of Mexico. The story takes place in the future where technology has advanced so much they are able to create clones and other amazing creations. Matt has no parents though, he was taken care of by a caregiver named Celia, who was pretty much a mother to Matt. Matteo Alacran is hated though, not because he’s bad or mean, but because he is simply a clone. It seems that the clones in this book have built up a shoddy relationship with everyone else. Everyone hates Matt, except for Celia, Maria and El Patron, who loves Matt like he loves himself, because Matt is himself. After being brought to the Big House, he is treated like loyalty by El Patron and gets his very own body guard, Tam Lin. As Matt continues to struggle on understanding himself, he and Tam Lin have become quite the friends and went on various adventures together in secret. The protagonist of this book is obviously Matteo Alacran, which you can tell very quickly at the beginning of the book. His allies include Celia, El Patron and Tam Lin. He does meet other people through out the book and you can find out whether their allies or not with Matt. The Antagonist’s include Rosa and Tom, who probably hate Matt the most. The book was very well written in my opinion; each character had their own original and different personalities and interacted with each other very well. One thing that was really good about the book was how Nancy Famer didn’t give the personalities and look of each character immediately. Instead she gradually built up each character looks and personalities with little descriptions through out the book. The book also had rich sections that included some great action and suspense. At the end of each chapter, it always ended with a cliffhanger that made you always want to read on and never stop. The book also demonstrated lots of rich and descriptive language and made the scene very clear of what was happening inside the book. To me, the book started slow but slowly built up and was really good during the middle, it continued this way all the way to the end but I was kind of disappointed at the very ending. The very end sort of just dropped from all the action and suspense, which kind of disappointed me. Another thing that I though Nancy Famer did well in the book are twists. There are a lot of twists in the book that shock and surprise you; I thought that this was a really good aspect to the book that also helped keep the readers attention. Overall, this was a very good book in my opinion; it included many of the factors that make a great book. I would give this book a 9/10.