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.
Pulp & Pixels 