about the book
El Patrón is dead.
Matteo “Matt” Alacrán, one of El Patrón’s clones, steps in to take the dictator’s place. Matt outlived the old man and never lost any of his organs to the despot.
Now Matt has the chance to change the lives of everyone in the Land of Opium, the largest territory of the Dope Confederacy. Or so he thinks…. El Patrón’s old lackeys are not ready to give up their power, and the “eejits,” El Patrón’s army of mindless, drug-controlled workers, have no will to do anything other than what they have been programmed to do.
Matt, with his new status as Lord of Opium, seems to have very little power. He can’t even smuggle his childhood love, Maria, over the border, nor send aid beyond the border to help alleviate the effects of the ecological disaster that decimated the world powers.
And there may be a problem closer to home. Like, inside himself. He hears a whisper sometimes—could it be the personality of the evil old dictator finally awakening in him? Matt is El Patrón’s clone, after all.
about the author
Nancy Farmer was born in 1941 in Phoenix. She and her brother and sister grew up in Arizona, close by the Colorado River. On their street was a fruit-packing factory, and they ate the too-big and too-small fruit for free.
Nancy didn’t like school. She became good at playing hooky (don’t do it yourself!). She would go around Yuma, AZ, and watch “quickie” weddings or look for hobos jumping off train cars. One day she found a few pages of a book, which she read and loved. Knowing she could be turned in to the school, Nancy took a chance and visited her local library, where she showed the pages to the librarian. She found the book for Nancy, and from then on Nancy played hooky by going to the local library. That librarian never turned Nancy in.
After college at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Nancy joined the Peace Corps and eventually was dispatched to Zimbabwe. She met her husband in the capitol city of Harare, and they married within a few months.
While reading a book to her four-year-old son, Nancy decided that she could be an author, too. She wrote her first story, selling it first in Africa and then getting a story sold back in America. After that, Nancy’s career took off, and now she writes full time.
Sources:
Author website
Author biography: Wikipedia
Also by Nancy Farmer:
The Islands of the Blessed (Trolls Trilogy, Book 3). Richard Jackson Books. 2009.
The Land of the Silver Apples (Trolls Trilogy, Book 2). Richard Jackson Books. 2007.
The Sea of Trolls (Trolls Trilogy, Book 1). Richard Jackson Books. 2004.
The House of the Scorpion, Book 1). Atheneum Books for Young Readers. 2002.
A Girl Named Disaster. Orchard Books. 1996.
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm. Orchard Books. 1994.
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