What a pleasure it is to read fantasy full of warm and strong characters. Here people truly love each other, but make terrible mistakes; children do not understand anything in life and are therefore extremely vulnerable; mighty rulers command people, but they themselves are worthy of pity. How nice it is to read science fiction where serious problems of good and evil are solved without violence. It's so nice to read science fiction that interprets science correctly. How nice it is to read “The House of Scorpio”! Ursula Le Guin

At his coming-of-age party, Matteo Alacran asks his bodyguard: “How old am I? I understand that I don’t have a birthday like people do, but somehow I was born!” “You were produced,” Tam Lin answers him. “You were raised in a poor cow for nine months, and then they took you and cut you out of it.” To almost everyone around him, Matt is not a boy, but an animal. He is kept like an animal on a bed of sawdust, with cockroaches for friends, and old chicken bones instead of toys. But to El Patrón, the all-powerful ruler of the land called Opium, a strip of poppy fields stretching between the United States and the country once called Mexico, Mutt embodies the hope of eternal life. El Patron loves Matt as himself, because Matt is himself. They share the same DNA. As Matt struggles to understand the meaning of his existence, he is threatened by a host of sinister characters, including the power-hungry Alacran Family. He is surrounded by a formidable army of bodyguards and brainless idiot slaves, bending their backs in the poppy fields. And even after escaping from the Alacran estate, Matt does not receive the long-awaited freedom, because he differs from other people so deeply that even he himself is not aware of it. Unexpected, exciting adventures await the reader on every page of this vibrant fantasy novel.