In this sequel to The House of the Scorpion, Matt returns to Opium after the death of El Patrón and all his family. As the last living copy of El Patrón, Matt is now legally human and, more importantly, recognized as El Patrón himself. With opium shipments piling up and a rival drug lord at his door, what is a fourteen-year-old boy in charge of a drug empire to do? Matt wants to do the right thing by fixing the eejits, those who tried to cross Opium to go to either the US or Aztlán and were instead captured and turned into mindless slaves, and pulling up the opium to plant real crops, but those around him, like Cienfuegos, the head of the Farm Patrol, are determined to turn him into El Patrón Junior. So Matt sets about learning about his kingdom, including the hospital in the mountains where he and other drug lord clones were grown, the biome where all the habitats of the world have been preserved, and the observatory linked to the Scorpion Star, El Patrón's space station. As he digs deeper into the life he has inherited, he learns more and more about the lengths El Patrón went to build and protect his kingdom. Can he figure out how to do the right thing while keeping the power El Patrón left him? Or will he turn into El Patrón, living out his ninth life as the old man would have wanted?
Like The House of the Scorpion, I enjoyed this one, but I probably would have enjoyed it more had it come out more quickly after the first one. There is a focus on the ethics of altering people without their consent, and Nancy Farmer allows the reader to wrestle with that issue along with Matt without presenting one right answer. She has also managed to create a world that's just futuristic enough that it feels like it could still be our own. The ending is open enough for another sequel, but it's also satisfying in case she doesn't. This is a good one if you enjoy your YA dystopias free of love triangles or romance in general and with less of an emphasis on chosen-one-saves-the-world narratives.
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