Ship Breaker

I'm really happy to have found a slew of great YA literature of late. It restores my faith that publishers really do care about putting out quality work. Ship Breaker is among the quality.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have one word. Atmosphere. I can't remember the last time I read a book where the atmosphere took over. It even took over plot and characterization. Usually character comes first for me, and the characters were good here, but I honestly loved the setting more than anything else about the story. Bacigalupi does more than create Nailer's dystopian Gulf Coast in a way that I could imagine it. It was so vivid that I felt more like I was in his world.

And what a world it is. It's something out of the slums of a third world country: the filth and the disease and the hordes of disenfranchised people swarming over wrecked ships, scavenging for whatever is left behind...spare copper, steel, oil - all the while just hoping to scrape by without getting killed by a host of both environmental and human threats. It's different and surprisingly good.

I was also fascinated by the drowned cities. Imagine coastal cities like New Orleans or San Francisco, tall sky scrapers and streets and bridges all covered in water. There is something haunting about imaging these cities, once heavily populated a hundred years before, now disintegrating under the ocean. I see it the way I might imagine a ship like the Lucitania or or the Titanic, once inhabited by people, now sunk under the depths. I couldn't help but think of all the things left behind now rotting in salt water. (And it does make me pretty excited about the next book in the series, The Drowned Cities.)

There is something beautiful about this mysterious and decaying landscape.

There were a few other things that I found captivating. Nailer's world is run by large companies that control vast portions of wealth. It doesn't seem like there are any real government entities, and people are either very poor or very rich. It's a dog-eat-dog sort of place where survival means looking out for yourself first. And it isn't hard, at least in my mind, to see the world turning out this way. Especially when governments kowtow to big corporations and banks and forget the constituents they are supposed to serve.

I also really liked Tool. Tool is a sort of half-breed human/dog. In the story, scientists have figured out a way to genetically engineer a new species, and these particular beings are supposed to be both excellent fighters and extremely loyal to a patron. But Tool has no patron and he survives on his own. I think I liked Tool more than any other character. He's supposed to be brutal and animalistic, but I think he was more human than most of the characters in the story. That only further emphasizes how far the human beings in this world have allowed themselves to fall into avarice and selfishness. It sounds like Tool features heavily in the next book, too, so I'm excited to see where Bacigalupi takes his story.

All in all, as far as dystopian lit goes, I think this pretty much nails it. I have only one complaint - as Jami said - more romance. I'm a girl like that. Oh, and I also agree, as Jami said, find a new phrase for "blossomed with pain." I didn't notice it at first, but by the end of the story, I was counting the number of times it was used.


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