Rakev

       The book The House of The Scorpion by Nancy Farmer seems to be a fantastic and exciting book. Matteo Alcaran is not the average human being. In fact, he is not human at all. He is a clone. He came from a 143 year old man named El Patron, who is the lord of a country called Opium.  Opium is a strip of poppy fields lying between the United States of America and what was once called Mexico. The powerful and wealthy (as you can imagine) El Patron had his DNA extracted then put into a petri dish. The DNA made a copy of itself and split into two new daughter cells, essentially a clone that is genetically identical to El Patron. Then the clone was placed in the womb of a cow, where it continued the miraculous journey from embryo to fetus to baby Matt Alcaran. Matt is a boy now, but society considers him to be a beast of some sort. For example, a woman named Rosa locks him up for six months in a filthy prison. She defiantly does not consider him human and that is evident by the way she treated him. She truly believed he was an inferior creature to that of a human being and treated him like a pig. This had severe impacts on Matt's mentality and he did not speak for a long period of time. El patron sees the physical and mental suffering Matt had in Rosa's prison and orders him to be taken to his mansion. Because of El Patron's order, Matt is now being well educated, well fed, and taken care of at the mansion. He is also assigned a body guard named Tam Lin, who Matt was unsure of at first but quickly ends up liking him. Matt eventually starts to speak (with the help of Tam) and quickly learns and even excels in many different subjects such as: Spanish, English, mathematics, piano, guitar, and even astronomy. There are other kids in the mansion , namely Maria and Tom. Matt likes Maria, who is the daughter of a senator, but he despises Tom, who seems well behaved on the outside but deep down, is evil and even potentially unstable. However, no one agrees to Matt's claim's, even if they are correct.

      The House of Scorpion reminds me of my science class and the biology unit of the grade ten science text book. In that unit, there is a section specifically dedicated to genetics. During reading the book, the issues Matt Alacran and non cloned humans face in terms of morality and ethics are quite similar to the things mentioned in the text book regarding the foreseeable issues we will face if this kind of technology became available for people like El Patron that have great wealth, power and influence. Some of the things we discussed in that unit that reminded me of this book were: who decides what is acceptable and what is not in terms of experimenting with human genetics? And where does society draw the line between what is accepted and what is not? These are some questions no person or government seems to have a definite answer to in the fictional world of the House of Scorpion.

Most of the characters in the book (including Matt) are bilingual and English and Spanish are regularly mixed. Spanish names, phrases, words, and even sentences appear throughout the book. I think it was a conscious decision by the author to include Spanish. Since the setting of the story is mainly in Opium, Azlatan, and Santa Clara, which are three separate states that are located south of the United States of America, it makes logical sense for Spanish to have a presence in the story. As a result of that, there were some Spanish words, references and background knowledge that I was not familiar with.




       If I had to describe the mood or tone in the novel the house of Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, I would have to say the book has a very tense, worried, and mysterious tone to it. The story is written almost exclusively from Matt's perspective, and he is a guy who is under a lot of pressure. So it makes sense that this book has a lot of tension in it. Matt is often anxious and worried, and his worry comes out in the novel's overall tone. Throughout the story, you can just feel how stressed and upset Matt is in a given moment. He has made a huge discovery about his own identity, which is the fact that aside from being a clone, he is essentially a property of El Parton and someday his fate would be decided. But he does not quite understand it, and he worries over his unknown fate, because his fate is a mystery. Matt does not know yet that he's destined to donate his organs to El Patrón. This mystery only adds to the tension. Matt often doesn't know what's going on, so he is forced to play detective and put the clues together himself. When reading through many of Matts adventures throughout the story, I too, as a reader, had to figure a lot of things out for myself. However, certain things are revealed to us, and certain things are kept secret. An example would be the personal life of Matt’s main body guard, Tam Lin. Although Tam Lin is a major character in the book, not a lot is known about his personal life and his life before he began working for El Patron. In the end however, details about Tam Lin’s personal life, his intentions, and his ultimate fate are revealed. 




       If I personally had to pick a major theme in the novel The House of The Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, it has to definitely be regarding a human being’s individuality and self-identity. I am pretty sure no one likes it when someone copies them. Everyone tries to express their individuality through the means of the clothes they wear, the style of their hair, the shoes they buy, the music they listen to, or even by their overall personality. Okay, so imagine if someone was an exact copy of someone else. How can they possibly be an original person if they are identical to someone else right down to the genetic level? When these two individuals have identical appearances, finger prints, and DNA? This is a problem that Matteo Alacran deals with all throughout in the book The House of the Scorpion, and his identity issues are further complicated by the fact that he is cloned from a very bad guy. Aside from the fact that Matt is musically gifted and shows compassion throughout the story, he is very much like El Patron. In fact, Matt is an exact genetic copy of El Patrón, who is an individual who grew up with essentially nothing, yet ended being a ruthless dictator and drug lord of Opium. As he grows into manhood, Matt has to fight not to follow in El Patrón's footsteps. He struggles to be his own person and make his own decisions. And he's not the only one. Everyone in Opium including the slaves, servants, body guards, and family members, are under El Patrón's control, and it's hard to be yourself when you have a man like that watching over you. In the end, Matt discovers that he can create his own identity by making his own choices and decisions.