YA Book Review: The House of the Scorpion

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Complex and rich, Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion grows from the family history created by drug lord, El Patron--a character mirroring the often bizarre machinations in characters spawned by Oscar Wilde or Nathanial Hawthorne.

El Patron, the most powerful man in the world, builds an empire on opium, slavery, augmented reality, and cruelty. He keeps himself alive for 148 years by harvesting organs from from clones created from his DNA.

The story follows the life of Matteo (called Matt), created from El Patron's DNA. We follow Matt's journey because unlike the other El Patron clones, his brains were kept intact. He was not drugged and operated into idiocy. He was not to be touched or harmed...yet, he was loathed by most around him.

It seems clones are akin to mongrels...not human. Dirty and without souls, many fear them and cringe when one is near. All, except for Matt, are kept away from humans...some strapped in hospitals or animal pens.

Beyond the main characters and those with the most text devoted to them, Farmer excels at building character. Many characters experience emotional highs and lows, moments of humanity, and moments of darkness--darkness emerging from fear, revenge, greed and several other of humanity's frailties.

In this excerpt, we see a bit of Farmer's ability to use artful dialogue to develop character. You may not know this novel, but we know a little something of Matt, Fidelito, and Consuela in just this snippet of text:


Matt blinked away tears. "How can anyone celebrate death?"
"Because it's part of us," Consuela said softly.
"Mi abuelita said I musn't be afraid of skeletons because I carry my own around inside," said Fidelito. "She told me to feel my ribs and make friends with them."
"Your grandmother was very wise," said Consuela.

The writing is so strong in The House of the Scorpion, that novels such as Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, M.T. Anderson's Feed, and Lowry's The Giver came to my mind as I read.

The plausibility of the circumstances surrounding the novel also engaged me--I didn't have to suspend belief because so much of the tale is woven on morality. Gosh, so many opportunities exist for reflection and conversation on morality, science and nature, as well as what makes us human. I love the opportunities presented here for great discussion and most certainly clean, healthy, challenging thought.

I can imagine adolescents having many questions--often beginning with "Why did he/she..."--and I do love that about this book.

Decorated like a naval hero (National Book Award; Newberry Honor Book; Printz Honor Book; ALA Notable Children's Book; ALA Best Book for Young Adults; among others) The House of the Scorpion once passed from hand to hand in my classroom (only a few years ago). Now, with so many other choices flooding the market and our classrooms, great books sometimes find themselves lost in the boneyard.

It is up to teachers, and teachers who are great readers, to keep great contemporary literature in the
hands of adolescents. Please consider adding this to your classroom library and do a book talk on this gem to keep it alive in the hands of this generation of readers.




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YA Book Review: The Graveyard Book

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My 8th grade students speak of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book in a different key. Reverential, they utter the word "weird"...and then from that deepest pit of their bellies they almost always agree, "soooo good."

And then they say nothing else. The memory of the book makes them silent--as if they travel back into the experience for a moment.

Obviously, I'm processing my own thoughts about The Graveyard Book by recalling snippets of the reactions of my students--these were my first encounters with the novel. After the fifth or sixth similar reaction, I finally bought the book and read it over the course of a few days.

Gaiman builds the story around a prophecy--a child will be born who will end the reign of a magical, dark, organization. This group's power and influence has infiltrated all walks of society for thousands of years--and they very much would like to see this child dead.

They murder his family, but the infant escapes and finds itself protected and raised by phantasms of the graveyard--the dead rise, those neither living nor dead appear, and witches, ghouls, demons, and shape-shifters round out the rest of the cast.

And as Gaiman notes in his Newberry acceptance speech, he didn't write a book about childhood...he wrote a book about parenting. "It takes a village to raise a child" is deconstructed and reimagined as a graveyard.

I really liked the story--I too have that same visceral respect that I hear in my students' voices. You read this for the same reasons that you read Mary Shelley or watch a Tim Burton film--there are story tellers and there are artists who tell stories. Gaiman's work is art--and like so many museum-goers standing before Van Gogh's color and stroke or a larger-than-life Rothko, silence and awe speaks volumes.





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Online Reading Challenges

I've signed up for two challenges: the Printz Project Challenge, and the Book Awards Challenge.  Each provides another way for me to find some excellent books I have not read yet.

I like both...while the Printz challenge of course limits me to its taste in books, I have to say that I have really enjoyed everything they have acknowledged.  The Book Awards Challenge will force me to mix in some novels other than YA which will be good for me as I've been on a steady diet of YA since November.

I'm considering trying the Newberry Project which sets the goal for the participants to read every book ever awarded the Newberry Medal which dates back to 1922.  This one intrigues me and seems like something a middle school language arts teachers should be doing...I'm going to sit on this one for a day or so until I settle in with the other two projects in addition to keeping up with books published each month.