I remember reading “The House of the Scorpion” when I was in middle school, and after re-reading it over the long break, I was kind of confused. It seemed like I had read an entirely different novel years ago. This was the first real “sci-fi” novel I had ever read, and it was for class in 7th grade.
This go around, it read like a fairytale. Not one with a happy ending or a moral, but something from “Kinder- und Hausmärchen,” also known as Grimm’s Fairytales, specifically “Rumplestiltzskin.” Matteo is locked in a room (incidentally, covered in straw), awaiting his fate, not unlike the miller’s daughter in “Rumplestiltzskin.” The child in the fairytale is promised to Rumplestiltzskin in exchange for spinning straw into gold, but the queen is able to thwart his plan and keep her child.
A ton of pretty obvious parallels between the two, but I think they’re necessary for some young adults to read science fiction. The familiarity makes difficult subjects/social commentary much more user friendly.
