Invercargill City Libraries

Ship Breaker

Posted by Donald on 17 January 2012 | 0 Comments

Tags: pursue 100, your reviews, top reviews, science fiction

Paolo Bacigalupi

I picked up Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi at last year’s Peruse 100 prize giving and I am immensely glad I did. Ship Breaker is set in a dystopian future where our current reckless abuse of the environment has finely taken its toll. The seas have risen and wiped out entire cites and the occasional country and massively destructive storms now roam all over America’s Gulf Coast region where thousands live in shanty towns just trying to eke out a living dismantling grounded oil tankers.

Teenage Nailer works as a part of the light crew, striping copper wire and other small scavenges to make quota and hopefully live to see another day, because if you don’t make quota there are hundreds of others who would happily kill to take your place. However when Nailer discovers a beautiful clipper ship beached after the latest “city killer” storm he must decide whether to strip the ship for all its worth and buy his way out of his dispirit situation, or save the rich “swank” girl trapped inside who could lead him to a better life.

 

Ship Breaker is an amazing novel and Paolo Bacigalupi effortlessly plunges the reader into Nailer’s world, starting on the beach and the extreme poverty that resides there, to the discovery of the clipper, and finely to the world outside his beach which is not all that better off. This made me do a lot of thinking as we don’t need to wait for a dystopian society to see people living as Nailer does. It is happening now, all over the world, and I think plenty of people could benefit from being forced to realise how some kids have had to grow up and that not everybody will have been lucky enough to have the upbringing that they may have had. The line between the haves and the have nots in Ship Breaker is immense and shows how all of our world may one day end up if we are not careful.

 

I love reading Ship Breaker and every time I do I get something new out of it. If you’ve enjoyed novels like The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, The Maze Runner series by James Dashner or Inside Out and Outside In by Maria Snyder I would highly recommend Ship Breaker to you, although only to older readers as some of the ideas that Ship Breaker deals with can be quite dark.

 

(Reviewed by Courtney)