"House of the Scorpion" by Nancy Farmer

I found this book to be pretty disappointing, which is impressive because I didn’t go into the book with any expectations. I could see myself having really liked this book if I had read it a decade prior, but as it stands I ended up having so many little issues that it was difficult for me to enjoy and impossible for me to recommend. My complaints are very directly tied into the characters and plot, so it’s impossible for me to really discuss anything without delving into spoiler territory. The broad gist is: I felt like the book underused its pretense and did not adequately or meaningfully explore the implications of Matt being a clone. The characters were flat and uninteresting across the board, and the plot fell into a disjointed mess somewhere around the last third to quarter of the book.

I had an unpleasant feeling for much of the book, the ways the characters interacted was frustrating. I despised Matt and Maria’s relationship. The extent of the conversation in the book about the moral or spiritual standing of a clone existing as a person was one person saying “Matt bad” and Matt either agreeing or disagreeing. I’m not sure how to articulate this well, but my frustration is that I didn’t feel like the topic was ever explored past a surface level. I don’t know if it’s fair for me to expect an in-depth introspective and ethical examination of cloning from a YA novel, but I kind of felt like that’s what the blurb on the back of the book was selling me. I was overall fairly neutral on the book until Matt escaped Opium and was immediately imprisoned at a work camp in not-Mexico. Everything started to feel rushed and messy; the last two or three chapters were rapid-fire ‘x happens’ ‘y happens.’ It also didn’t feel like any action Matt made had any lasting consequence. To a degree, especially early in the book, this is the point: Matt is a clone, a clone is an animal, an animal cannot be held to the same standards as a person. (This isn’t an incredible insight; the book straight up states this at one point fairly early on.) The problem is that this continues ad-infinitum and everything just really easily works out for Matt, who can do no wrong.

There are two instances in the book of him doing something that is not justifiable: harassing Maria at the party and then later kidnapping her dog so that she will talk to him. The problem is that there’s nothing for Matt to actually be held responsible for. In the first instance, he is an eleven(?) year old child hunting for the approval of the man he respects the most. In the latter case, it is immediately overshadowed by someone doing something significantly worse, framing him for it, and then what should be an act-long misunderstanding to resolve is solved in one to three short chapters. What he was framed for should have long lasting consequences on his relationship with Maria and instead she just gets to overhear the real aggressor admit it on their own. His relationship with Maria is improved and Tam Lin pretty much immediately learns the truth after re-entering the story, (having left upset with Matt after the aforementioned negative event) which Matt accomplished by doing nothing whatsoever. Matt is very good at doing nothing as it’s also how he resolves the penultimate conflict and returns as the lord of Opium: he shows up at the town where Maria is and then he gets all of El Patron’s stuff because now that El Patron is dead, Matt is legally him and no longer invalid as a clone. The final resolution of a conflict in the book is the clone Matt getting to take the legal identity and possessions of the person he was cloned from. I absolutely hate this as the resolution to Matt’s legal identity as a clone.

Directly stating its messages is a bit of a theme in this book. It’s not inherently bad to throw subtly to the dogs, especially in books targeted at a younger audience — when every single thing the book wants to say is directly stated, it’s exhausting. It felt like the deepest the book was willing to explore into any topic was for Matt to disapprove of something after thinking about it briefly. My eyes glazed over every time Jorge said ‘thing that is bad but slightly twisted to maybe sound somewhat okay’ and Matt replied ‘that sounds exactly like equivalent thing that is bad.

As a YA novel, it is required for there to be romance, and unfortunately I clocked Maria as the ‘love interest’ as soon as she was introduced. I genuinely wouldn’t consider saying that a spoiler for anyone who has even heard of YA as a genre. There’s a really weird dynamic throughout the entire book (which is kind of the point, still weird); Maria treats him as if he is somewhere in between a person and a dog, until she rapidly transitions to considering him a person, and the whole thing just felt really uncomfortable because they’re like fourteen and somehow the relationship between the two lead characters of the book still feels underdeveloped. This novel really would have benefited in a lot of places if it had an extra hundred pages. Honestly I think this deserves a much longer review; I don’t think I’ve really managed to say what I wanted to but I don’t really want to keep on going. This book has a lot of really good ideas I think it’s just incredibly hit and miss with what works and what doesn’t.

It’s incredible to me that the sequel was published eleven years after the original novel because the original novel just randomly ends.