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Reviews (1)
10 April 2012
Coming of age story with quite a few twists and turns
This book was one of the selections for required reading in my daughter's middle school. Nancy Farmer is a good writer, but this story has disturbing elements used to illustrate its theme.
The main character is a clone of a drug lord who has extended his life through his clones. The scorpion, as the drug lord has been called, has ruled for generations over an small empire in the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico. It is a giant opium plantation with only a few privileged residents, mainly family and servants who reside in the "house of the scorpion".
It is written as a coming of age story of a person who has no legal status, except as property. This clone has been allowed to illegally retain his intelligence. The minds of clones are generally destroyed at birth, but the drug wants his own clones to retain their minds until his health requires harvesting them for transplant.
In addition, the giant opium plantation of the drug lord's empire is worked by people who have had their mental abilities curtailed as adults. This process turns them into "idjits" who must be directed to even care for their most basic needs, perfectly docile and mindless workers. Even the privileged family members are subject to constant surveillance and must act according to the whims and caprices of the drug lord.
Later, after escaping termination for transplantation, the main character is subjected to an orphanage where the supervisors practice thought control through indoctrination and communist style self criticism sessions. No one is truly free to think and do for themselves in this story regardless of their legal or illegal status.
The entire book is an exploration of what it means to be human, through the eyes of one who is regarded as a mindless animal.
Everyone in our home who read this book came away with something different depending on their age. Most of the things I thought were echoes and parodies of various fascist, communist, immigrant status, institutional abuse, etc., issues, were not familiar to younger readers. They were more focused on the individual injustice of the clone's life.
I prefer some of Ms. Farmer's other books, but this book is well written and provides a lot of take off points for discussions with a middle school student.