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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

There is much for older children, teens, and adult to think about and discuss after they read Nancy Farmer's disturbingly believable imaginings of life 100 years from now. Young Matt lives in Opium, a small country tucked between the United States and Aztlan (known today as Mexico) where drugs are the sole product, exported around the world to great economic profit for Opium's leader, El Patron (not to mention the two neighboring governments). When he is six, Matt discovers he is the clone of the 130-year old El Patron. Clones are considered subhuman creatures, and the only reason Matt has not been subjected to a life of torture and inhuman treatment is that El Patron insists his clone be treated with the same respect he himself is due. As he grows, Matt begins to learn how Opium functions -- how people who are captured trying to cross the border -- human traffic between Aztlan and the United States now runs in both directions as people seek a better life -- are implanted with a microchip that turns them into ijits, mindless automatons who work the opium fields until they literally drop dead. He sees how El Patron leads with a cold heart and iron fist, but feels a confused kind of love for the old man with whom he shares the closest imaginable physical bond. But under the guidance of Celia, the older woman who has cared for Matt since he was a baby, and Tam Lin, one of El Patron's body guards who has been assigned to help protect the him, and with the help of Maria, the young daughter of a U.S. senator who often visits El Patron and his family, Matt begins to realize that even though he IS El Patron, he has the free will to choose the kind of person he will be. Whether he will ever get to execute that free will becomes a chilling question when Matt discovers he is not being groomed to take over the leadership of Opium as he thought. All the care and education that El Patron ordered for Matt was nothing more than the old man creating the childhood he never had. Matt's fate will be the same as the eight El Patron clones that came before him -- provide the old man's failing body with organs to survive. A finely crafted work of science fiction that is unsettling, provocative, and hard to put down. Winner, CCBC Printz Award Discussion; Honor Book, CCBC Newbery Award Discussion (Age 11 and older)

CCBC Choices 2003 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2003. Used with permission.

From Publisher's Weekly

May 17, 2004
In our Best Books citation, PW
wrote, "In this eerily realistic depiction of society 100 years hence, the wealthy class harvests the organs of clones to prolong their lives. Farmer explores vital and soul-searching questions about what it means to be human." Ages 11-up.

From Publisher's Weekly

Starred review from July 1, 2002
Farmer's (A Girl Named Disaster; The Ear, the Eye and the Arm) novel may be futuristic, but it hits close to home, raising questions of what it means to be human, what is the value of life, and what are the responsibilities of a society. Readers will be hooked from the first page, in which a scientist brings to life one of 36 tiny cells, frozen more than 100 years ago. The result is the protagonist at the novel's center, Matt—a clone of El Patrón, a powerful drug lord, born Matteo Alacrán to a poor family in a small village in Mexico. El Patrón is ruler of Opium, a country that lies between the United States and Aztlán, formerly Mexico; its vast poppy fields are tended by eejits, human beings who attempted to flee Aztlán, programmed by a computer chip implanted in their brains. With smooth pacing that steadily gathers momentum, Farmer traces Matt's growing awareness of what being a clone of one of the most powerful and feared men on earth entails. Through the kindness of the only two adults who treat Matt like a human—Celia, the cook and Matt's guardian in early childhood, and Tam Lin, El Patrón's bodyguard—Matt experiences firsthand the evils at work in Opium, and the corruptive power of greed ("When he was young, he made a choice, like a tree does when it decides to grow one way or the other... most of his branches are twisted," Tam Lin tells Matt). The author strikes a masterful balance between Matt's idealism and his intelligence. The novel's close may be rushed, and Tam Lin's fate may be confusing to readers, but Farmer grippingly demonstrates that there are no easy answers. The questions she raises will haunt readers long after the final page. Ages 11-14.

From AudioFile Magazine

Nancy Farmer's all-too-believable dystopia is the setting for the story of Matteo Alacran, born a clone of the evil El Patron, ruler of Opium. As Matt grows, so does his understanding of his purpose (to provide renewal body parts for El Patron) and the things he needs to do to stay alive in a society based on the abuse of brain-damaged slaves who tend the opium fields. As the suspense builds, narrator RaÅ"l Esparza has convincing command of several languages and many accents for the adults, and he perfectly captures the arrogant intonations of entitled teenagers who, like most of the story's characters, consider Matt to be lower than an animal. Even amid Matt's most horrifying predicaments Esparza delivers brief moments of ironic or childlike wit in this thought-provoking story. R.H.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine