Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Fifteen-year-old Nailer spends his days crawling through the ducts of old oil tankers collecting copper wire and other metals for salvage. By night he avoids his drunken and drugged father’s fists. If he doesn’t make his daily quota, he won’t just lose a day’s pay but his job and his chance to work other jobs in the shantytown that salvagers have built on the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of the Arctic ice caps melting. After a hurricane, he and a friend find one of the sleek clipper ships owned by an affluent family and they decide to claim it as salvage, but onboard they find a teenage girl who is the sole survivor. If Nailer and Pima kill Nita, a member of the upper class that the ship breakers call “swank,” they will get rich off their find. But if they let her live, Nailer may just find a way to change his life.

This is a story about the nature of family, whether it the family a teen is born into or the one they make, Nailer travels an incredibly poignant emotional journey. However, do not think this is merely a character novel or family drama. Ship Breaker is all action and impossible to put down. It’s the best thing I’ve read that Paolo has written.

There is violence and the threat of violence in this novel that may disturb some readers, such as a discussion about whether to cut the fingers off what appears to be a corpse to get her gold rings. (It’s a give-you-the-shivers moment.) However, I felt the violence in the novel was appropriate, especially in the scenes with Nailer and his father, to show the reader understands the risks Nailer deals at work and home.

This book would be a good addition to curriculum looking at Third World and developing countries, such as India, where people of all ages, including children and teens, work incredibly dangerous jobs.

In the interest of intellectual honesty, I want to disclose that I met and shared a beer with Paolo and another science fiction writer in summer 2006, when he was in Lawrence, Kan., to receive the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference. Although Paolo and myself have never worked in the same newsroom, we share a number of mutual professional acquaintances in both journalism and SF publishing. (Paolo works at the High Country News, a news magazine covering environmental issues in the West.)

I’ve read several of his novellas and short stories that were aimed at an adult audience, including the ones that were nominated or received some of the top awards in SF. Paolo builds incredible worlds that are extrapolated on the environmental, social, and economic issues that we face today. He writes about desperate people in high-stakes situations and his stories have always had punch.

But as good as they are, I always felt disconnected from his characters. That has changed with Ship Breaker (and perhaps it had changed with The Windup Girl, which I have yet to read). I do not know whether Paolo’s incredible vision of our near-future needed the room only a novel gives. Perhaps as a writer he broke through a barrier that to my mind took his work from great to unforgettable. It may have been that Ship Breaker was one of those books that just clicked. No matter the reason, it is a story that haunts and contains a level of intensity that I found lacking in his earlier work. That emotional impact, his imaginative world building, the intense plot, and his wonderfully lean writing makes Ship Breaker worthy of the awards that it has received to date.

• Ages: 15 and up
• Genre: Science fiction, dystopia fiction
•  2010
• Pages: 326 p
• Publisher: 2010, Little, Brown and Company (an imprint of Hatchette Book Group, Inc.)
• Awards: Ship Breaker won the 2011 Michael L. Printz Award and was a 2010 finalist for the National Book Award 2010. It is a finalist for the 2011 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, which will be announced this summer.) Bacigalupi also is a past winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Compton Crook Award 2010. 

The Maze Runner by James Dashner (2009)

In the first of a trilogy, 16-year-old Thomas is delivered to a glade in the center of a maze; his mind stripped of all personal memories. He meets other Gladers, who have lived in the center for the maze for as long as two years, trying to find a way out.

Food, clothing, and medicine are provided for the boys. But the boys have little safety from the dangers of the maze and at times, each other. Moving walls close each night to protect the glade from dangerous Grievers, rolling monstrosities constructed of blubbery flesh, cutting tools, and hypodermic needles, that prowl the maze. For reasons he doesn’t understand, Thomas wants to become one of the boys who risk their lives to run the Maze to map its daily changes trying to find a way out.

Shortly after Thomas arrives, a catatonic girl is sent to the Gladers with a message that things will change. After Thomas and two other boys survive a night in the maze, they start to question their assumptions about the maze. Before they can explore their new ideas, the walls that protected them at night begin to remain open.

Ultimately, a number of the boys, Teresa and Thomas solve many of the maze’s mysteries, face down Grievers, and escape the maze but not without a terrible cost, half of the Gladers are killed. At the end of the book, the boys discover that they are part of an experiment, reminiscent of the William Sleator’s 1974 House of Stairs. But rather than conditioning the Gladers to violence on cue, as Sleator’s characters were, the Gladers are being conditioned to never give up.

While I think that a number of people will enjoy the tense action in this story and the high stakes, this novel had several problems that prevented me from enjoying it. I felt very disconnected from the protagonist and point-of-view character Thomas.

Another problem I had was the world building revolved around damage by caused by solar flares, making the book more horror than science fiction. There were other issues, like why not build a space ship, rather than some complicated behavioral experiment. (Check out NASA’s Ask an Astrobiologist to learn how solar flares can’t do the damage described.) Rather than getting into all the problems here, I will discuss the issue that I think will impact teens the most.

Because all these characters are stripped of their memories, they are very one dimensional. Thomas does not get to know the other characters very well nor he does not experience deep emotions, therefore neither does the reader. Dashner could have avoided this problem by using more sensory details to describe Thomas’ emotions, rather than telling what his protagonist was feeling. The characters who die feel like there were put in the book only to die because Thomas feels little loss, even at the end when one of the boys sacrifices himself to save Thomas.

Teresa feels like Helen of Troy, a beautiful woman who causes conflict and must be saved, rather than a real person. This was reinforced for me when I read the short section from the sequel The Scorch Trials and learned that the Gladers were in trouble again and Teresa has been separated from Thomas.

All that said, if readers can suspend disbelief — a number of teens and adults should be able to do so — they will enjoy the action and the uniquely bizarre circumstance as much as they enjoy a summer action movie.

• Publisher: Delacorte Press (an imprint of Random House Children’s Books)
• ISBNs: 9780385737944, 9780385907026, 9780385737951, (Paperback); 9780307582881, (CD).
• Pages: 374
• Ages: 12-plus, older teens with a strong science background may not like it
• Genre: Action with a dash of horror

— Originally reviewed January 2011