(:)(:)(:)(:) for The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. This is the best "children's" book I have read in years. Anyone who likes good fiction should read it.
Written from the perspective of a brilliant, inquisitive growing boy who is painfully (and uniquely--from our perspective) different from other children, the book beautifully examines the many forks in the road of human moral development. Each painful experience we have (and he has many) shapes us and gives us an opportunity to choose compassion, love and redemption, or to choose bitterness, isolation and hatred as a matter of survival. Sometimes we start down one fork, only to cross over to the other.
This perfect coming of age story is set in a compelling yet subtly revealed back-drop of a futuristic North America that plays out one set of disturbing consequences to the current environmental, trade, immigration and labor practices.
Although the cover boasts a Newberry Award and other accolades, none of the blurbs on the back really do the book justice, perhaps because they are pitched to the target market: people buying books for 13 year olds. The target market should indeed buy this book, but so should everyone else.
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