The Clone Who Wasn’t Supposed to Have a Soul

A boy grown in a field like a crop

Here’s the setup, and it’s a genuinely nasty premise dressed up in a story for twelve year olds. Matt is a clone of El Patron, the ancient drug lord who rules Opium, a strip of land between the US and what used to be Mexico, now run entirely on poppy fields worked by “eejits,” people who’ve had computer chips implanted in their brains to turn them into obedient labor. Clones are supposed to be harvested for organs and kept mindless with drugs so nobody has to feel bad about using them for spare parts. El Patron, being a vain old monster who loves his own life more than he loves consistency, decided to let this one clone grow up smart, in a little house in a poppy field with a woman named Celia who loves him and can’t fully protect him.

So Matt spends the book as two contradictory things at once: the most privileged kid in Opium, showered with gifts and lessons from the most powerful man alive, and also property, a thing with a tattoo on his foot that says CLONE, a thing the household staff will not eat at the same table as. Farmer does not let you forget which one is true. The scene where Matt puts his hand on a piano and a housekeeper screams because clones aren’t supposed to touch nice things, that’s not subtext, that’s the whole book in miniature.

Where it earns the praise, and where I got bored

Look, I’ll say the obvious thing first because it’s true: this book is doing something braver than most dystopian YA that came after it. It came out five years before the wave of Hunger Games imitators, and it doesn’t do the thing they all do, which is make the horror abstract and telegenic. The horror here is bureaucratic and domestic. It’s a birthday party where the guest of honor is also, biologically, supposed to be spare parts. It’s Tam Lin, the bodyguard, who is one of the best minor characters I’ve read in YA, a broken, poetry-quoting killer who is kind to Matt in a way that never quite excuses what he does for El Patron. Their relationship carries more weight than most of the book’s action scenes.

Here’s the thing though. The pacing in the middle section, once Matt is essentially living as El Patron’s shadow heir, sags hard. There’s a stretch of court intrigue and family politics, Felicia and Tom and the awful spoiled cousin dynamic, that I remember skimming even as a kid who wasn’t skimming things yet. Tom in particular is a cartoon villain, a rich kid who’s cruel with zero interior life explaining why, and he never gets more dimension than “bad seed.” For a book this smart about systems of dehumanization, its handling of individual cruelty is sometimes lazy.

And I want to be honest that I’ve gone back and forth on how well the ending escape section holds up. Once Matt is on the run in the second half, the book shifts gears into more conventional survival adventure, child labor camps, a river crossing, and it’s competent, even gripping in places, but it loses some of the eerie specificity that made the first hundred pages so unforgettable. I don’t think that’s a flaw exactly. I think it’s a book that spends its first act being a horror story about personhood and its back half being an adventure story about escape, and the seams show a little.

A quick tangent: I recommended this to a friend’s kid a few years ago without rereading it first, going purely on memory, and I forgot how genuinely upsetting the eejit stuff is, grown adults reduced to shuffling labor with dead eyes because of a chip in their brains. It’s not graphic. It’s worse than graphic, it’s clinical. I got a slightly alarmed text back. Worth it, but know what you’re handing someone.

The scariest thing in this book isn’t the drug lord. It’s how easily everyone around him agreed to stop seeing a person as a person.

About Nancy Farmer

Nancy Farmer lived a genuinely strange, wandering life before she became a novelist, including years in Mozambique working as an entomologist and on a hippie commune-adjacent existence that reads like its own novel. She came to children’s books relatively late and brought with her a real scientist’s curiosity about how systems work, biological and political both, which is exactly why the cloning mechanics and the drug economy in this book feel thought through rather than decorative. She’s written other acclaimed work (The Ear, the Eye and the Arm won her earlier honors) but The House of the Scorpion is the one that made her a permanent name on school reading lists, and deservedly so.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, for the adult version of the same cloning-for-parts horror, quieter and even more devastating
• The Giver by Lois Lowry, for another kid slowly realizing the adults around him have normalized something monstrous
• Feed by M.T. Anderson, for a meaner, funnier take on bodies and minds as corporate property
• The Lord of Opium, Farmer’s own sequel, if you need to know what happens to Matt and Opium after the ending

You can find a copy here: The House of the Scorpion on Amazon.

For your book club

1. El Patron genuinely seems to love Matt in his own way. Does that complicate or worsen what he’s willing to do to him?
2. Why do you think Farmer chose to make the eejits, not the clones, the most disturbing image in the book?
3. Tam Lin is a murderer who is also one of the kindest people in Matt’s life. What do you make of that contradiction?
4. The book was written in 2002, before most modern conversations about gene editing and AI personhood. Does it feel dated or ahead of its time now?
5. If you were Celia, knowing what Matt was and what was planned for him, would you have raised him to love the world anyway?