The House of Scorpion, the United States National Book Award for Young People’s Literature winner in 2002, the Newbery Medal runner up in 2003, and the Michael L. Printz Award runner up in 2003 as well. The story takes place in a futuristic Mexico, known as Aztlán. Where the country is run by powerful and vicious drug lords, the majority of work is done by brain washed humans with computer chips in their brains (they call them eejits; a British form of idiot) and cloning is very real and used in everyday life for organ transplants but their brains are destroyed. The main character Matt Alacrán is a clone, but he was lucky. He was the clone of El Patrón (Matteo Alacrán), the most powerful drug lord in Aztlán, and “…a Matteo Alacrán. They’re…show more content… The novel covers so many relevant themes and lessons that are applicable to life as we know it today. The novel by Nancy Farmer is exquisitely well fit for the grade eleven english class because it connects to grade eleven’s lives through its fantastic themes, identity and power, discrimination and deceit, and science and language. The theme of identity and power amalgamates perfectly with the everyday life of a high school student, especially a grade eleven student and that is why its relevant to the curriculum. In the novel Matt fights a series of battles to grow up like a normal child but he never will. Clones are looked upon like garbage, trash, crap. Matt is the only clone that hasn’t had his brain destroyed after he was born from a cow, because of the immeasurable power of El Patrón. Matt’s endeavour to find out who he is begins when he jumps out of the window of his safe house where he had lived the first four or five years of his life. He lived there with a woman named Celia, she was Matt’s caretaker. But after leaving the safety of her small home he is thrown into a kennel “… a room full of sawdust to cut down on housekeeping.” (pg.55). El Patrón put an end to this and gave him a room in the big house, he could