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[SOLVED] What's the scifi book?
I'm looking for a book I read in middle school where people are factory farmed for their parts before they hit puberty by organic mech of some sort, but the protagonist escapes and is hunted but is able to hide in an abandoned (ship?) with some others and starts to fight back? For the life of me, my search skills are failing.
Running the description through a few LLMs, another common suggestion is The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer.
Yeah that sounds about right. IIRC the boy in the book is basically an organ donor for some big drug lord. I'll never forget the scene when he was farming Krill with his "buds" when he ran away.
Am I misremembering or wasn't the main protagonist also a clone of the person whose organs he was being bred for?
Correct, and he wasn't intentionally made brain dead as all the other organ harvestee clones were.
That sounds about right. I also remember he ran into another one of his clones who was having a procedure done and the clone was like screaming. Kinda messed 11 year old me up.
I LOVED this book when I was a kid. I barely remember what happens in it, but I remember not being able to put it down.
This was going to be my suggestion, although the ending doesn't quite align. Great book.
Seconding this guess, it's one of my favorite novels. There's a horde of kids who live on/near an abandoned ship that's on land. I want to say it's in a desert, but I might be conflating that bit with the S.S. Libra in Pokémon XD.
I highly recommend it, I even got my mom's book club to read it and they loved it. When I first read it in high school, I found myself still thinking about it six months later. It took me years to realize it's a dystopian novel because it doesn't have the usual micromanagement in dystopian fiction. Society as a whole feels normal beyond this one set of laws, at least in the first book. I haven't read the others in the series for various reasons so that may change in later books, but the first book really can stand on its own.
I can sing this book's praises for hours on end. It explores the concept of unwinding and all the potential implications so thoroughly, down to how it got to this point. It even explores how religion and the Bible can be twisted to not only justify unwinding, but lead some people to have children specifically as tithes, which just blew my mind. I've never seen another book do that, at least not with real world religions.
Just out of curiosity how long is your back log/do you have a list of books that you're playing to read in order after your current book?
How other people sort their books and determine what they will read next is always interesting to me.
I have way too many books in my back log I'd like to read one day (my want to read list on Goodreads has ~850 books).
Shades Children by Garth Nix
That's the one!! Thank you! I was wracking my brain...
You're welcome :)
Damn. I think I read Hoot in middle school