Why genetic testing should scare your pants off

Review of The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

I was in 5^th grade when my love for Nancy Farmer began. I read A Girl Named Disaster and gobbled up every word. I loved learning about the different cultures in the book and completely devoted myself to going on an adventure with the protagonist.

From there I read The House of the Scorpion and fell in love all over again. After that the two books sat on my shelf until my senior year of high school when I had to do an independent reading project for AP Biology.

Yes, you heard that right: AP Biology.

We had to choose a young adult novel that displayed scientific themes and I don’t remember exactly why we had to do this but I do remember thinking “This is an English project for a science class…I’m gonna read a book I’ve already read.”

(Author’s Note: That fleeting thought was long before I knew what literacy across the curriculum was and I now see the value of the science class YA novel book report thank you very much.)

I decided to re-read The House of the Scorpion, and let me tell you somewhere between 5^th and 12^th grade the reading experience changed drastically.

I still loved the book, but now that I was older and fully understood the impact of some of the scientific material in the book I finally understood why it could be controversial.

*Summary Contains Spoilers*

The book is set in the future North America in a country called Opium which lies between the United States and Mexico. Per its moniker, Opium is an opium-producing country ruled by a drug lord named Matteo Alacran aka El Patron.

In Opium we meet our protagonist, Matt, a young boy who lives in a little house with a housekeeper named Celia. Celia is a chef at “The Big House” but Matt isn’t allowed to leave their little abode. One day other children stumble upon his home and Matt tries to follow them. He ends up being taken to The Big House where he is thrown in a “prison” and treated like an animal for months.

Finally, El Patron finds out about Matt’s treatment and frees him. Matt realizes he has a place of status with El Patron but doesn’t really know why. All of the people at The Big House except Celia, Matt’s bodyguard Tam Lin, and a senator's daughter, Maria, treat Matt like an animal still.

So, it turns out that Matt is a clone of El Patron. That’s right; he has been born for one reason and one reason only: so El Patron can harvest his organs. There have already been at least 6 “Matts” at The Big House and they have all been harvested so El Patron is like SUPER OLD.

Matt also discovers that clones are supposed to be injected with some stuff that makes their brains turn to mush so they are basically vegetables ripe for harvest anyways. For one reason or another El Patron keeps Matt smart and hires tutors for him. Our protagonist is convinced that El Patron is educating him so he can finally retire and Matt can take over the drug cartel.

Of course, drug lords can’t be trusted and as soon as El Patron has a heart attack he comes a-looking for Matt’s fresh young organs.

Matt escapes and El Patron dies, but that does not end the problems for our clone friend. He has to try to cross the border into America, and in order to do so has to endure child labor, Marxism, and lead said group of child laborers in a revolution against said Marxists.

Yeah, Nancy Farmer plays for keeps.

Matt makes it to freedom and finds Maria who gets him in contact with her politically-charged mother. Together they help all the child laborers and begin to take legal action against the illegal drug trafficking.

In the end Matt returns to The Big House to find few people still standing. El Patron, the spiteful old drug lord, served poison wine at his funeral and his entire family is dead. Matt is his only living heir and takes over Opium.

I know it all seems hunky-dory at the end, but this novel is actually bittersweet. Most of Matt’s already-few allies (except Celia) are dead. He’s been through a heck of a lot and he’s in for more. There’s also the whole question of the cloning: will anyone truly see him as a real person?

This book brings up really interesting questions about the morality of genetic testing and cloning as well as questions about freewill. Matt may be a clone of El Patron but is he his own man? In a nature vs. nurture setting Matt ends up not being anything like his gene daddy. He even dismantles the drug cartel in the end and tries to make Opium better.

Report Card:

I give The House of the Scorpion a definite A. Farmer is an underrated writer and should gain much more recognition for her body of work. This book is great for high school for many reasons. It’s at a fair reading level so even kids who aren’t grade-level readers could get into it. It also raises a lot of questions about modern science and human nature that more advanced readers can tackle. Because of the science laced throughout the book this novel is also great to use across the curriculum—that’s a shout out to my AP Bio teacher.