Book Review Part 1: Technical info.

"For an instant Matt wasn't sure he'd heard right. Then the enormity of the situation sank in on him.'But I didn't! I wouldn't do such a thing to Maria! I love her!'"
Author: Nancy Farmer
Title: The House of the Scorpion
*Other publication info is copyrighted to Nancy farmer... Somehow*

http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/2003/bioimages/farmer.jpg (Anyone Know how to copy a jpeg onto this?)

Nancy Farmer grew up on the Arizona-Mexico border. Her father managed a hotel in Yuma, where she worked the desk from the age of nine. She couldn't help but overhearing stories from the cowboys, rodeo people, railroad, and circus workers who patronized the hotel. She joined the Peace Corps in the 1960's, and served in India for two years. When her tour of duty was complete, Farmer next spent 17 years living and working in Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Nancy published a few novels and a picture book with a Zimbabwean publisher, and then she stopped writing for a while. Farmer, her husband, and her son moved back to the United States. She still could not write. She kept at it, and soon published her first American title, Do You Know Me?. In 1994, the title that really got her noticed, The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm was published. This title had been one of the books originally published earlier when she lived in Zimbabwe. Farmer revised it and published it with her new American publisher. It is set in Zimbabwe, in the future, where the president's chief of security's children, bored with living in a too secure compound, decide to go out into the city of Harare. They are kidnapped by minions of She Elephant, and three mutant detectives are hired to get them back. Wonderful stuff: it was a Newbery Honor title in 1995.(www.teenspoint.org/reading_matters/columns2.asp?column_id=1153&column_type=tpauthprofile)

Genre: Science Fiction
I believe that this book has many themes, the most important of which is that nobody, no matter who they are, should be treated like dirt.

Background: The House of the Scorpion is set in a future where drug lords rule the border between America and Mexico (then called Atzlan), and cloning is possible, but clones are treated like livestock.


End Part 0ne