“The House of The Scorpion” Nancy Farmer

This novel is based on a genetically modified boy named Matt. Matt was born out of the womb of a cow by taking his first cell split and dividing it inside a Petri dish. He grows up as an outsider to the Alacrán Estate located in futuristic Mexico with only one friend, El Patrón. When he discovers that El Patrón has been using Matt for a mere experiment, his only chance for survival is to escape the estate. This ends up being quite a challenging task considering the fact that El Patrón rules all of Mexico being a powerful drug lord.

The most prominent theme of this book is rejection. This is represented throughout the entire novel with Matt being the different kid that he is. No one other than El Patrón accepts him for who he is, and even that changes when he finds El Patrón is using him. When he lives in the Estate everyone treats him as if he were some kind of monster, never making eye contact with Matt. For Matt, as one can imagine, this becomes extremely depressing and this is one of the reasons he tries to escape the estate.

This book is written in the first person viewpoint written through the eyes of Matt. It really is incredible how well the author catches the readers’ emotions and makes the reader feel bad for Matt who is treated like an animal. This shows how effective her writing style is because it captured my emotions and drew a perfect picture of Matt’s emotions. It was a very serious novel, which I normally dislike because I do like a few jokes here and there, but overall the style of writing was great.

The main issue in this novel like I mentioned above is the fact that Matt is rejected by everyone that he sees. Matt is extremely lonely in his tough life times and has no one to back him up. This pertains to many high school kids trying to find friend groups. These kids are usually rejected from them because they aren’t cool enough in the eyes of that friend group. You know you’re pretty similar to Matt when you are sitting at home on a Friday night playing video games by yourself.
This novel is related to nothing we have done in English thus far. It could loosely relate to Biology seeing how Matt was a genetically modified kid being born from a cow. Also in Business, we talk about some problems in Mexico including the drug wars going on over there. This book shows how powerful these drug lords are, and how little people can do against them.

The novel was a decent read for me. It had some really intriguing moments talking about how bad Matt felt sometimes, but also there were some boring sections of the book. One of the things that would have sparked a little more excitement in the book, would be to directly talk about how El Patrón came to be the powerful drug lord that he was at the time. I think this would help the novel because I find the drug wars an interesting topic. Also some comedic relief would be more than welcomed in a book like this. I would not recommend this book to others because there are so much better books out there.

The most rhetorical devices I find in any book are similes. One example of a simile used in this book is when Matt is trying to escape from the estate. He mentions that the sun was so hot, he felt as though he was thrown in a flaming crematorium. Similes make literature more vivid and they make the reader feel more connected to the writing, because if you use them well, they will make the writing more interesting and create emotions. In the same section of the book I found the use of personification. Matt uses this also when talking about the heat of the sun saying how it glared down upon him with burning eyes. Personification is treating abstractions or inanimate objects as human, that is, giving them human attributes, powers, or feelings. This enhances your view of the scene in the novel making it more vivid and more interesting to read.