Originally posted at The Wandering Fangirl.

Between glowing reviews on Goodreads and all the awards it’s received, I don’t know why I took so long getting around to reading The House of the Scorpion. The novel follows the tale of Matteo Alacran, a boy who was cloned from El Patron, drug lord and head of a country called Opium. The world building in this dystopian future is lovely; not too much exposition, but enough backstory that you know how they came to be where they were.

As we follow Matt’s life from his “birth” to his teens, we’re smacked with all the familiar question when it comes to clones: are they really human? Will nature or nurture decide who they become? All these questions are handled with care and wonderful writing by Nancy Farmer. I fell for Matt immediately; he was a completely filled in character, from his own questions about his mortality and morality to the way he interacts with other people and the world around him.

The only problem I had with The House of the Scorpion was about the last quarter of the book, where a whole host of new characters are introduced, and Matt is thrown into an even newer situation for no reason that I could see. I understood how he got there, but it felt like the novel could have ended on the same note it did without that interlude.

Overall, though, The House of the Scorpion was an interesting and engaging take on clones, dystopias, and what it means to be human.