The Lord of Opium

For my 3rd Quarter SSR, I read The Lord of Opium by Nancy Farmer. The Lord of Opium is a sequel of The House of the Scorpion, in which both books feature a clone named Matt who is treated less than a human by everyone except El Patron, the original Matt. In The Lord of Opium, Matt is the new drug lord and the owner of Opium, the land that was once called Mexico. The book is very science fictional and takes place at least 100 years from now and yes, I think it would be a type of book that could spark the interest of any reader 100 years in the future. Matt is conflicted because there are so many reforms he wants to make, so many impossible tasks he want to do to better humanity, and there are so many adults telling him what to do, all of this at fourteen. While Matt is figuring out how he's going to run a worldwide drug cartel, he is battling with himself after carrying the weight of all the people killed in El Patron's funeral via poisoned wine, including one of his closest friends and bodyguard, Tam Lin. While the adults are barking at him to make decisions on what to do about the overproduction of opium, Matt is devising another plan on how to awaken the eejits, or microchip controlled slaves, after he encountered a young eejit he named Mirasol. The story jumps between Matt making adult decisions that the adults in the story think is irrational, and doing things young boys do which the adults think is also irrational. Matt feels alone because he is seen as a God, which he likes, but he only wanted to be treated like every other human and even tries to be empathetic with the others even when they treated him like dirt when he was still a clone. The only person who ever treated him nicely were his caretaker Celia, his piano teacher Mr. Ortega, His bodyguard Tam Lin, his friend Maria, and of course El Patron- but he hates thinking about El Patron. After his death, Matt realized how evil El Patron truly was and now he's dealing with the people he cares about comparing him to El Patron even though Matt knows he's a clone of him. Well, Matt's focus is to stop distributing drugs, to make the world cleaner and safer, and to open the borders of Opium because it was the only dafe space left on earth with non-toxic air. In the end, Matt succeeds to awaken all the eejits, open the borders, grow better crops instead of opium, and make good alliances with other drug lords who, of course, stopped distributing drugs. In my opinion, it was a really good book with a really nice ending and I think it would peak the interest of a reader far into the future because it's very accurate when talking about science and future. It also features teleportation and real life hovercrafts which really sold me into the hundred years into the future book.