I remember reading House of the Scorpion when I was but a wee-middle schooler. I remembered it as being scary and depressing, but as I’m rereading it, I’m realizing my younger self was a coward. It isn’t scary. Mildly depressing, but nothing compared to Camus or Dostoyevsky. However, there is a huge emotional difference between a 20 and a 12 year old. And therein lies the problem of Young Adult literature.
A quick Google search tells me that the conventional definition of Young Adult Fiction is (at its widest) from around 12 to 21. While I liked to imagine that I was a well read teenager, the truth is that middle vs high school, grade school vs. college is immense. I could handle this novel when I was twelve and it definitely influenced my thought processes, but if I were reading it for the first time now, it would not have the same effect on me today. There is a level of emotional maturity that the Young Adult label does not accurately distinguish between.
I think it is great to challenge young readers in a novel like this one, but at the same time they are missing out. I did not understand any off the references to modern politics and problems, I did not understand any of the Hispanic culture, and I missed out on a few other subtleties. Also, age has altered where my sympathies lie. When I was 12, I hated the characters I was supposed to hate and I loved the characters I was supposed to love. Now I have more complex impressions of the characters and do no feel compelled to pick a side. The childish narrator resonated with me as a preteen more than it does for me as an adult. While I think Farmer does a phenomenal job writing for a child protagonist, it is still clear that it is an adult impression of a child.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that books like this are great for middle of the road Young Adult readers (more in the 14-18 range) but I think there should be a designation within the Young Adult label that has a higher and a lower age recommendation. House of the Scorpion pushes this need. While it is an excellent book with excellent ideas that younger readers should be exposed to, the tone and nature of the novel drastically shifts and can leave younger readers out in the cold. Younger readers would definitely get the larger themes of the novels, but miss out on other important ideas that only more developed readers can understand.