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.




View all my reviews

YA Book Review: Jasper Jones

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Printz Honor winner Jasper Jones begins fast--the title character (the town teen pariah) knocks on the bedroom window of a boy he barely knows and leads the protagonist, Charlie, to the dead body of teen female dangling from a noose.

The novel strikes me as a bit of a homage to Mark Twain. While the protagonist reads Puddin' Head Wilson and discusses Twain with his father, much of the novel smacks of the memorable components from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Puddin' Head Wilson.

Jasper Jones himself is cut from the cloth of Twain--part Injun Joe and part Huck, Jasper appears and disappears. He has dragged Charlie into a crime that no one can solve...and by doing so drags the reader into the tension as well. The piecing together of clues and the reasoning he occurs between Jasper and Charlie draws on the litigious merits of Puddin' Head in addition to Atticus Finch (who Charlie also mentions and regales in the novel).

For page upon page, we wait for the other shoe to drop. We wait for someone in charge to discover the body, to find A clue, to approach Jasper or Charlie and bring them in for questioning. We look over our shoulder for the spotter planes, the detectives, the search parties to find the body of adolescent Laura Wishart.

As the tension grows palpable, and as Jasper and Charlie uncover truths even more horrible than the body of the dead girl, author Craig Silvey develops some wonderful complexities of plot among side characters: Jeffrey, Charlie's parents, Jeffrey's parents, and Mad Jack Lionel (the murderous man the town hates and fears). Charlie's own Becky Thatcher, Eliza Wishart, evokes the spirit of Audrey Hepburn, or rather Holly GoLightly, and continues the very vivid resonance of Twain's influence and inspiration on Silvey...not to mention the fact that the hateful, racist, and judgmental town mirrors the hypocrites of St Petersburg, Missouri.

There's even a body of water--although this one resonates more with Marilyn Robinson's wonderful lake of the damp and eerie fictional town of Fingerbone in Housekeeping. Robinson's cold lake swallowed secrets...as does Silvey's.

I really like Jasper Jones--mainly because I loved being yanked into adventure immediately, and I thoroughly enjoyed the characters. I felt compassion for Mad Jack; I laughed at and with Jeffrey; bitterness for the townspeople just to name a few emotions.

"By Jingo!" to inoke The Adventures of Tom Sawyer...this is an entertaining coming-of-age adventure combining coming-of-age, crime, and the passage from innocence to experience.

View all my reviews

YA Book Review: Where Things Come Back

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

John Corey Whaley's (Where Things Come Back) antagonist Cabot Searcy steals the show. He reminds me of Hazel Motes from Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood. Searcy learns about a secret writing called "The Book of Enoch" and can only be found in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible--upon reading its story of the archangel Gabriel being sent to Earth by God to destroy the children of the fallen angels, Cabot Searcy becomes consumed with it.

Searcy's plot line plays second fiddle to the protagonist Cullen Witter for much of the novel--and for much of the novel I felt in limbo. Nothing seemed to happen...even though I was intrigued and had bought in to the lives of the small town people of Lily, Arkansas.

Consumed by the possible return of a thought-to-be-extinct woodpecker, the townspeople of Lily embrace the hope that elusive Lazarus woodpecker has resurrected itself in their humble town. Led by college professor John Barling, the townspeople believe because they want to believe--they need to believe--that something special could happen for them. Upon this backdrop that we join in the ten-week wait, the patient and painful ten-week wait, for any word or sign of their youngest son, fifteen-year-old Gabriel Witter. Gabriel vanished one day without a trace just a week or so after attending the funeral of their cousin Oslo Foukes--a local junkie who succumbed to demons he could never defeat.

And as a reader, you wait, and wait, and wait for any sign of hope...for any tangible proof that this woodpecker has returned, and for any shred of evidence for a lead into what happened to Gabriel Witter. You hold it together with Cullen, yet like Cullen, you have no idea what to believe...or how Gabriel's story will end. Whaley's narrator processes this for the reader, and for me, serves as the heart of the story:

"We can be comforted in the fact that life will always be a struggle. There will always be false hopes. Lazarus woodpeckers. There will be John Barlings to lead us astray and Oslo Foukes to remind us that maybe we are doing things right after all."

I can imagine my stronger and mature student readers caught up in this book and definitely recommend it for a classroom library anywhere from 8th grade and up.



View all my reviews

YA Book Review: Looking for Alaska

Late in the game, I read my first John Green YA novel over the past couple of days: Looking for Alaska.

I see his books self-selected by my 8th grade students, and had one tell me this week that he is their favorite author.  Another enthusiastically told showed me signed copies of his latest book.  Not having John Green on any of my classroom library shelves, and never having read him,  I'm working through them now in the hope of discovering more high interest literature for my room.

The Printz Award winner Looking for Alaska is excellent--John Green doesn't need me to say that.  Starred reviews of this novel hit 5/5 stars all over the place, but before you put it on your classroom shelf you need to read it and have that talk with yourself--is this appropriate for my classroom?

Part of me writhes and despises this talk.  When we have this talk about a great book I feel naive and like an old fuddy-duddy.

A coming of age novel, Looking for Alaska contains teenagers sneaking around smoking and drinking at a boarding school.  They talk about sex--there are some brief references to and acts of sex--as well as suicide and death.

Sometimes when I have this talk it feels as though I'm trying to convince myself that teenagers are not curious about those things.

I'm reminded of the film version of Grease.  In 6th grade when it was released, I saw it at the beach  during the summer heading into my 7th grade year.  While my mom used to cover my eyes in the movie theater if someone kissed or worse in a film, she didn't ban me from seeing Grease and I can't recall anyone blaming Stockard Channing or Olivia Newtown John for inspiring sexual deviance in their children, and John Travolta and Jeff Conway seem like they are off the hook for smoking among teens in America and calling their car a "pussy wagon"--there are factions of adults who can look at the fabric of teen America as it is presented in books and film and label it inappropriate.  Yet, I think I've only met people in my age bracket who regard Grease fondly, and when we talk about it we don't hyperfocus on "flogging the log"--mostly we remember the story and the connection to some part of our adolescence.  Things are only inappropriate in hindsight--after we experienced for it ourselves--and in the case of Grease I'd be a hypocrite to call it inappropriate.  I'm having that same though about Looking for Alaska.

Highly recommended--look, I get what everyone else sees too--Looking for Alaska, and I'm learning more specifically, John Green, makes connections with adolescents.  Yet is it a book that you have to leave to them to find, or do you make it a little easier to access by keeping it on your bookshelf in your classroom?  By the looks of it, kids are doing a pretty good job of getting their hands on it already.

But before you put it on your shelf, have that talk first.

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.