Ship Breaker

Ship Breaker

by Paolo Bacigalupi. 2010. 326 pages. New York: Little Brown.

Author Website: http://windupstories.com

Awards and Honors: 2011 Printz Award, National Book Award Nominee, Andre Norton Award Nominee

Recommended Age: YA, specifically older teens

Annotation: In a post-apocalyptic future, Nailer is a teenage laborer living in grinding poverty and constant danger. When he finds a wrecked clipper ship he must decide whether to kill the only surviving passenger and take everything she has, or to risk everything to rescue her and claim a bigger prize.

Personal Reaction:
In the not-too-distant future, life as we know it is over.

After the fall of the Accelerated Age, cities are gone, governments have crumbled, civilization has been destroyed, and the vast majority of humans exist in desperate and unimaginable poverty.

Ship Breaker is the story of Nailer, a teenage laborer living day-to-day in the most grinding and extreme circumstances imaginable. Nailer works as a “ship-breaker”, scavenging anything he can from the hulks of rotting oil tankers on the gulf water shores of Bright Sands Beach.

In Nailer’s world you need to be lucky and smart to survive.

When a massive hurricane wrecks a clipper yacht on the shore, Nailer gets his chance to make a "lucky strike" and change everything he has ever known. He is faced with the most important decision of his life.

Does he kill the only surviving passenger and take everything she has or does he risk everything to reunite her with her people and claim a bigger prize?

In a world where your entire life is determined by luck, how do you know what’s right and wrong?

Nailer’s decision leads him on a violent and risky journey that challenges his fate as well and makes him question everything he has ever known.

I have to admit, I’m not much of a sci-fi adventure reader, but I decided to see what this book was all about. 10 pages in I was hooked. I couldn’t wait for the next time I could pick up the book and read about Nailer, Pima, Nita and Tool. I found myself holding my breath during suspenseful scenes. Ship Breaker is scary and gritty and violent. But it’s also about hope, and love and loyalty. The bonds between people that exist when nothing else does.

What made this book so compelling for me was how real and possible everything was. This world is terrifying, but you don’t have to stretch your imagination too far to realize that it’s not very far away if the world continues down the path it’s on.