Unlike Bacigalupi’s previous book, The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker is more of a YA offering but, like The Windup Girl, it is very much set in a post-warming world (as opposed to post-apocalyptic as I see it so often described). The main character, Nailer, is a young teenager living a grindingly poor existence stripping obsolete, beached oil tankers on America’s Gulf Coast for their scrap metal. Though this setting is clearly based on the very real and very dangerous salvaging of beached ships on Pakistan’s coast at Gadani, it is given added poignancy by setting it in America and playing on a poverty gap even more severe that we are experiencing today. Nailer’s discovery of a yacht shipwrecked by a storm with just one survivor – the daughter of a massively rich shipping merchant – offers Nailer the possibility of escaping his abusive father and desperate life on the beach.
I hadn’t realised this was YA when I bought it and the rather predictable and shallow plot are possibly, at least partially, excused by that but it doesn’t excuse the longwinded, and frankly self-indulgent ramblings, on loyalty and friendship that constantly interrupt and slacken the pace of the first half of the book. Later the pace picks up with plenty of action and our hero proves himself, though again I found I could only suspend my disbelief sufficiently by remembering that this is a YA book.
YA books are not really my thing and so unsurprisingly I found Ship Breaker rather too lightweight for my tastes. However, as with both The Windup Girl and many of his short stories, I do find I enjoy the stark realism of Bacegalupi’s world building and so I will probably continue on to the sequel.
I hadn’t realised this was YA when I bought it and the rather predictable and shallow plot are possibly, at least partially, excused by that but it doesn’t excuse the longwinded, and frankly self-indulgent ramblings, on loyalty and friendship that constantly interrupt and slacken the pace of the first half of the book. Later the pace picks up with plenty of action and our hero proves himself, though again I found I could only suspend my disbelief sufficiently by remembering that this is a YA book.
YA books are not really my thing and so unsurprisingly I found Ship Breaker rather too lightweight for my tastes. However, as with both The Windup Girl and many of his short stories, I do find I enjoy the stark realism of Bacegalupi’s world building and so I will probably continue on to the sequel.
