Review Detail

The House of the Scorpion involves a huge variety of ethical, scientific, and emotionally inspiring events in the story line.  This book is based about 100 years in the future where anti-gravity hovercrafts are the major use of transportation.  The main character is a young clone of a large drug lord, Matteo Alacrán, who rules the land of Opium, the land that was created between the nations of the United States of America and Aztlán (formerly named Mexico).  The United States has become much less appealing to the point that just as many people are crossing the border into Opium on both sides trying to run all the way through Opium, the country.  Opium, the plant, has morphine and other addictive narcotics in it. The addictive chemicals in opium has made opium become a very profitable and popular drug and is now farmed and processed by eejits.  Eejits are people who tried to cross the border, got caught by the border patrol of Opium, and had computer chips installed in their brains(because of the computer chips they can only do simple tasks like farming).  Matt is the clone, and his sole purpose, known to all but Matt, was to become a heart donor to the original Matteo Alacrán.  At the age of 148, the original Matteo Alacrán has a heart attack and needs Matts heart at which point a huge plot twist tells how Matts caretaker has been slowly drugging Matt so that his heart cannot be used as a transplanted organ.  Matt is therefore no longer of any use, and is issued to be killed.  Through a series of detailed events, Matt escapes and barely manages to cross the border into Atzlán.  All but few look at Matt as a beast throughout this story whether it is because of being a clone or his political standpoint on the practicality of eejits allows him to have very few friends and a large amount of enemies with a lot of power over Matt.  Matts life goes from bad to worse when over the border he is put straight into physical laboring.  The heads of the laboring places also dislike matt because of his individuality.  Matts ability to stand up to the heads of the factory causes a revolution in the rest of the workers and Matt has another attempt on his life because of the revolution.  After the life threatening catastrophe Matt is saved by finding his true friend from his life before he left Opium.  This friend has quite a bit of political power and so she made Matt go back to Opium as its rightful heir and destroy the drug producing empire.  I really liked this book because it was more than just a couple of characters and a simple, predictable plot.  The storyline had a lot of plot twisting events, and very complicated and detailed characters.  This book was even better because it explored various disputes between religion, government, consciences, and other sorts of moral dilemmas.