The house of the scorpion, Nancy Farmer

I have been having problems with my hard-copy prose reading - for the last week I have been trudging through an appalling book with a horribly overentitled aggravating main character, and then I tried to get out of it into, variously, a) a Captain Alatriste novel that spends the first forty pages sacking a Dutch town in a particularly annoying manner b) China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, which is not working for me at all c) Daniel Abraham's A Shadow in Summer (first in a quartet, and the dialogue is irritating). Having failed at all of these I then went off and read vast quantities of fan fiction, which at least irks me in different ways (failure to pay attention to setting and lack of fight scenes, mostly), re-read Diana Wynne Jones' Eight Days of Luke (excellent. Am composing self-indulgent discussion post in another window) and then finally picked this up last night and read it. And I now feel less like giving up on all prose fiction published in the last twenty years, which will hopefully turn out to be the right decision in the long run.

( Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion. )