Customer Reviews

Ship Breaker

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Nailer, a teenager, is one of many people who live in shantytowns along the US Gulf Coast, trying to eke out a dangerous living by working on disassembling crews, taking apart abandoned -- and now obsolete -- oil tankers. The work is dangerous, and taking risks is almost a necessity, because if the young workers don't make quota, there are always other starving kids ready to take their jobs. Once the children get too big to crawl down the narrow ship ducts in search of copper wiring and other recyclable metals, there aren't many options left to them... and if they're not strong enough to do the heavier work, prostitution, crime or starvation are almost inevitable.

At the start of Ship Breaker, Nailer finds an undiscovered oil reservoir in the ship he is exploring -- a lucky strike that would be sufficient to feed him and possibly provide escape from his abusive father. However, when he almost drowns in the oil, and one of his young crew mates finds him, she decides not to rescue him and leaves him to die so she can take advantage of his find. Even though Nailer manages to escape, this incident, set early in the novel, is a perfect introduction to the competing themes of "loyalty in the face of adversity" vs. "everyone for themselves" that run through Ship Breaker. After all, when Nailer finds a gorgeous clipper ship run aground during a hurricane, he faces the same choice: should he rescue the rich "swank" girl trapped inside, or let her die so the ship's salvage can make him wealthy?

YA novels have changed just a tad, haven't they? Yep, although you maybe wouldn't guess so from the paragraphs above, Ship Breaker is actually the first Young Adult novel by Paolo Bacigalupi. You can draw a straight line right from the author's excellent SF novel The Windup Girl, which also focused on the disastrous consequences of environmental change, to Ship Breaker. Even though the reading level is YA, and most of the main characters are teenagers, the grimness (not to mention the violence) is definitely straddling the border between adult and YA.

Be that as it may, Ship Breaker is a well-written, gripping SF novel. The story's scope continually broadens, from Nailer's initial find, to the arrival of the clipper, and ultimately to everything the ship's owner stands for. Likewise, the dystopian future gradually becomes clearer as Nailer becomes more aware of, and eventually ventures into, the world outside his beach shantytown. As mentioned before, the theme of loyalty is approached from different directions. Just to name a few: Nailer's relationship with his abusive and addicted father; the connections with and between his crew's members; and maybe most interestingly, the concept of "halfmen," genetically engineered to be loyal to their owners.

While I enjoyed Ship Breaker, and would recommend it to mature YA readers, I can't help but wonder if this story wouldn't have worked better as a regular, non-YA novel. Some of the darker concepts, situated on the periphery of Nailer's story, are only broadly hinted at rather than described outright, which left me feeling frustrated and wanting to read more. If you told me there was a 600-page adult version of this 340-page YA novel, in which Paolo Bacigalupi really embraced the story's darkness and delved more deeply into the world's history and set-up, I'd be first in line to read it.

Still, armchair-quarterbacking aside, Ship Breaker is a good novel with a likable protagonist, a gripping story, and a vision of the future that's sadly becoming more probable by the day. If the grim realism of the environmentally ruined future described in The Windup Girl didn't bother you, and you're in the mood for something in the same vein but at a slightly easier reading level, definitely check out Ship Breaker.

I enjoyed Ship Breaker quite a bit, with all the popcorn munching enthusiasm of watching a really good action flick. I definitely give it props for its entertainment value, and considering that his target audience can be quite fickle, I think Mr. Bacigalupi did a fabulous job with the pacing, moving the action around, and always giving us something new to see. This book would make a great film, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised to hear that it's been optioned already.

What impressed me no end was how well he plunges the reader into a life of extreme poverty. As I was reading about Nailer's life, I thought, we don't need to wait for a dystopian society to see people living like this. It's real, and it's happening now, and I think any middle class teenager could benefit from thinking about how some kids have to grow up. It's shocking, and startling, and the line between the haves and the have nots is bigger than the Grand Canyon. I got all riled up, and it's my hope that other readers do too.

Entertainment value aside, I think the story falters a bit on the emotional side. I felt a connection to Nailer, but it didn't go bone deep. Considering all the terrible stuff that happens to him over the course of this book, I should have been crying for him at some point, and I never did. I'm also curious to see whether teens will embrace Nailer, who is the antithesis of the typical tall, straight-limbed, attractive hero. He's short, scrawny, and horribly scarred. He's not attractive by any conventional standard, so my inner cynic is questioning whether true young adult readers can overcome their natural inclination for superficial beauty.

Ship Breaker is another excellent entry into the ever-growing category of young adult dystopian fiction. If you've enjoyed novels like The Maze Runner by James Dashner, or Inside Out by Maria V. Snyder, then definitely put this one on your list too.

I am reviewing an Advance Reading Copy from the publisher.

In this post-oil world stricken by global warming, it's hard not to find similarities between Ship Breaker and Bacigalupi's debut, The Windup Girl--positive similarities. As in his adult SF release, Nailer's future Earth is not pretty--in fact, it's quite desperate. Progressive rebuilding has resulted only in ruinous achievements. New Orleans has been reincarnated not once, but twice after the public realized it was prone to flooding. The worlds suffer similarly, as do the people. The privileged few oversee large corporate entities; the underprivileged majority do the worst possible jobs to get by every day (one has to wonder if this isn't happening right now). The divide between the rich and the poor is drastic.

Both are gritty dystopias. The worlds are, quite literally, falling apart. China is still a world powerhouse and humanity won't stop engineering composite lifeforms. Sea levels are rising at alarming rates, cities have been drowned. Despite the compulsion I felt to make a comparison, Ship Breaker is not entirely similar to The Windup Girl. There's something piratical that marks it distinctly from his debut and not just because there were large bodies of water and ships involved. Thievery mentality and loosely based support systems thrive along the wasted Gulf Coast. I couldn't help feeling that I'd never quite left Emiko's world, though. Things are not exactly the same--it's unfair of me to declare Ship Breaker the YA version of The Windup Girl. What is fair is to say the similarities I found in these two books are the same types of outcomes seen in a wide variety of dystopias.

It might be the thematic predictability of such books is what's turning a brilliantly adventurous book into something that didn't quite go as far as I would have liked, but I don't think so. Making the fantastical extrapolations that these dystopias do seems natural. The world is realizing our resources are not finite; the weather is acting strangely. These things are happening right now. Why not imagine a future where we do one day run out of oil, where the weather's gone to the extremes?

The characters are all a bit quirky with mono- and disyllabic names and a broad range of ethnicities and skin tones. What's amazing about this is how subtle and normal Bacigalupi makes this information. It's so offhand and inconsequential to what's really important that I wanted right there and then to tell him how much I appreciate this. Not making a fuss out of skin color is just as amazing as including minority representation.

One of the more interesting character elements was the inclusion of Tool. Tool is an odd collection of genes (hyena, tiger, dog, human) engineered to have utter loyalty, a fierce temperament when needed, but has the unfortunate side effect of having a face that looks a bit canine. While he may not look pretty, Tool's face is supposed to inspire fear, especially since half-men like him are mostly used as thugs and bodyguards. Tool makes a unique case. His rebellion against the natural order of half-men (and the irony of his name) has elevated him to the mysterious and aberrational ranks of Emiko. And here is one other similarity I found between Ship Breaker and The Windup Girl. What frustrated me the most wasn't the connection between how Tool acts and how Emiko acts--both break with convention and "go against their programming"--but rather the lack of a backstory. Tool keeps his past shrouded in mystery, constantly reminding Nailer and those around him how unexpected his actions are. I didn't stay frustrated for long; Tool's origins are probably best left unanswered, especially since I realized it was not knowing combined with how anomalous he was that became so fascinating. His right to secrecy allows him the dignity his social status wouldn't provide otherwise.

I did, however, wish I'd gotten more information on half-men in general so I could really relate to everyone's incredulity rather than being told how loyal they are and how unorthodox Tool's behavior was against those conventions. That would have helped me believe the other character's reactions much better. Ship Breaker is such a short book relative to the events that happen--I can see why Bacigalupi may have stylistically left that out. There was so much suspense and multiple rescues that I felt the book could have done well as two! We're never in any one place for very long before something happens. I found myself wanting to linger at certain scenes, but couldn't when Nailer was quickly whisked away to the next.

I think there's room for a sequel. I say this because I want a sequel. I want more adventures and the implications are there for another. Ship Breaker is one of the bestYA books I've read, not just this year so far, but ever. And this is the best solution I can think of when I say I want more. I wasn't quite ready to leave Nailer's world and wouldn't mind going back for another visit. Bacigalupi proves yet again he has the talent to write an engrossing story with very human considerations at heart.

This is a darn good book.

In my estimation, any book that that can grab me and not let go until I finish it falls into that category. Such was the case here. I have a bad habit of getting bored with a bok and not sticking it out to the end, or becoming so distracted by "real life crap" that I can't finish what I started. This was the case with The Terror, and Catch-22, and Lamb, and Crime and Punishment... And a few more. But Ship Breaker hooked me and kept me going.

Very quickly, in a dystopian future where global warming has melted the polar ice caps and turned the gulf coast into a catch-all for huge Category 6 hurricanes, a teenager named Nailer and his crew scavenge old oil tankers and live a pretty miserable life. After a huge storm, Nailer discovers a shipwrecked yacht, with a swanky rich girl inside, and all manner of exciting things begin to happen.

One thing that gave me pause before I began this book was the global warming angle. Regardless of my opinions one way or another on any issue, what I don't want is to begin a novel and get stuck in the middle of a heavy-handed lecture. There was one scene near the middle of the book that began to veer in that direction, but to the author's credit, he didn't linger for long. He got in, made his point, then got on with the story, and for that I was glad, because it's a hell of a good story. Because of this focus on the story and the characters rather than The Message, the underlying cause of the state of the world in this tale has more ressonance. And also, the world PB has created here is so vivid and lush and real, it would do him and this book harm to be too focused on the cause. For that, I applaud him.

This book is listed as Young Adult, but if you wouldn't have told me that, I never would have guessed, aside from the fact that the protagonist and his buddies are all in their early teens. I know for a fact I would have loved this book back in the bygone day when I was a YA myself. I look forward to forcing it on my boys, maybe yank them away from their manga binges, get 'em cultured up a bit.

For years now, reviews from other Amazon readers have proven to be valuable in helping me decide whether or not to buy a book. I usually trust the opinion's of the mass public over any official award from some authority. In return though, I've never contribute single review myself. The selfishness ends with this book. I want everyone to read it.

I cam to know of this book from Philip Reeve's blog (author of the fantabulous Mortal Engines series), and as he was my favourite author at the moment, I decided that if he recommended it it had to be worthwhile. I even went out and bought the hardcover because I was too impatient to wait for the paperback. This was the first hardcover that I'd bought in my life.

And it was so worth the money. I'm not going to delve much, but instead simply echo the words of other reviewers in saying that the book got me hooked. The dystopian future imagine by Paolo bacigalala isn't too far-fetched, which adds an impending sense of imminence to it. His sense and grasp of poverty and its stranglehold on people's morals entirely real. His dialogue and narration deeper and way more sophisticated than a lot of other YA books that favor plot over language. The ending, complete yet open to the endearing possibility of a return to the series.

I couldn't wait however. I needed more of this Bacigalallaa guy's work. Saw that he'd written an earlier novel called the Windup Girl and thought that would be a nice filler till the sequel to Ship Breaker (if it ever happens) arrives. No way Windup Girl could be better than Ship Breaker. WRONG AGAIN DIMWIT. Now I'm waiting desperately for his PumpSix short story collection to come out on paperback in DEcember 2010.

This Bacigalala guy, he is writing extremely good dystopian stuff. Good enough that Philip Reeve ain't my number one no more.

Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker may have been written for the 'young adult' market, but frankly it's a great read in its own right. Gripping, fast-paced, with memorable characters in a not-too-distant future where life for many is harsh and bleak and the stakes are survival itself.

For anyone who has read any of Bacigalupi's other work (The Wind-Up Girl and/or his short stories), the setting will be familiar. It's the post-oil age and the world has changed dramatically. The old global economy has long since collapsed and a new one has emerged, where sleek, hi-tech, wind-powered ships transverse the oceans and old oil-powered steel hulks lie abandoned and rusting on the coasts. Global warming has changed the world, melting the polar ice caps so that open shipping lanes now cross the Arctic and coastal plains all over the world have been flooded. Food is expensive and much of the world's population lives on a subsistence level. It is in this world that Ship Breaker takes place.

Somewhere along the Gulf Coast, where hulks of abandoned oil-powered steel ships litter the shores, people survive by working at ship-breaking: scavenging these hulks for anything salvageable that they in turn can sell to the big corporations as raw materials. The ship-breaking work is done by two kinds of crews: 'light crews', whose task is crawling in the narrower parts of the ships - in work ducts and between hulls - and stripping out things like wiring and anything else that can be carried out, and 'heavy crews', who cut up the ships for the steel plating, pipes and engine parts.

The protagonist, a boy called Nailer, is part of a light crew. Light crew tend to be small, young and desperate as the work is gruelling, unpleasant and dangerous. And transitory, as sooner or later, every kid becomes too big to do the job, at which point they have to hope they're big enough and strong enough to get work on one of the heavy crews. Bacigalupi quickly immerses you in Nailer's world:

"Nailer clambered through a service duct, tugging at copper wire and yanking it free. Ancient asbestos fibers and mouse grit puffed up around him as the wire tore loose. He scrambled deeper into the duct, jerking more wire from its aluminum staples. The staples pinged about the cramped metal passage like coins offered to the Scavenge God, and Nailer felt after them eagerly, hunting for their dull gleam and collecting them in a leather bag he kept at his waist. He yanked again at the wiring. A meter's worth of precious copper tore loose in his hands and dust clouds enveloped him.
--The LED glowpaint smeared on Nailer's forehead gave a dim green phosphorescent view of the service ducts that made up his world. Grime and salt sweat stung his eyes and trickled around the edges of his filter mask. With one scarred hand, he swiped at the salty rivulets, careful to avoid rubbing off the LED paint. The paint itched and drove him crazy, but he didn't relish finding his way back out of the mazelike ducts in blind blackness, so he let his forehead itch and again surveyed his position.
--Rusty pipes ran ahead of him, disappearing into darkness. Some iron, some steel -- heavy crew would be the ones to deal with that. Nailer only cared about the light stuff -- the copper wiring, the aluminum, the nickel, the steel clips that could be sacked and dragged out throught the ducts to his light crew waiting outside."

It is a harsh, unrelenting subsistence existence, living from one day to the next with no real way out, only the vague hope of a 'lucky strike', some unexpected find of something truly valuable that will give them a chance of setting something up for themselves. For Nailer, that comes when he and his friend Pima find a wrecked sailing ship after a devastating storm. Filled with unimaginable wealth, it is their lucky strike if they can find a way to hang on to it before others take it from them. But there's a problem: they find a survivor, a young 'swank' girl with a claim to everything on board. If she lives.

I highly recommend this book for anyone, young adult or just plain adult, who enjoys a gripping, fast-paced read with believable and memorable characters for whom the stakes are unnervingly high.

Wow! I have read quite a few books in the dystopian genre, both adult and YA, and haven't liked one this much since I first read The Hunger Games. This book is a great example of good storytelling. The pace is intense without being frenetic. There's an edge of your seat feeling of dread and excitement throughout the entire thing that will keep you hooked. The author takes a chapter or two to set the scene, develop some characters, and to let the reader essentially get their feet wet in this new world he's created. It's not long though, before the story takes off and you are under way on a rip roaring adventure full of greed, murder, pirates, storms, and ship battles. Great stuff.

The characters in this novel are stellar. In Nailer you have the poor kid who dreams of a better life; the shipyard rat with the heart of gold and the courage of lion. In Lucky Girl, you have the swank who's used to the soft life, but is finding her true nature with the help of a skinny little rat she would have never even have noticed if the Fates had not intervened. All of the secondary characters are interesting and add to the story, especially the half men, genetic mutations bred to serve the rich.

The interesting sci-fi elements, the great characters, and the expert plotting all tie together to make this book truly memorable. Don't pass this one by. I picked this one up on the basis of it's consistent glowing reviews, and for once, here's one that lives up to the hype. This is a great choice - especially for adventure loving boys, even those who say they don't like to read. This is a must read for anybody grade 8 and up. No language or sexual content, just violence. This is a hard world the author has created; one that both teens and adults will find fascinating.

Ship Breaker was just amazing.

My favorite thing about this book was the dystopian setting. Much of it we have seen before--rising sea levels and depleted energy resources have resulted in widespread poverty and social breakdown--but Bacigalupi presents the setting in such a beautiful and realistic way that you really feel like you have been transported to the future. Despite being dystopian, the setting never feels bleak or desolate. Instead it feels almost exotic, as if you are in a 3rd world country that is both poor and beautiful at the same time, though the book takes place in the US. I particularly loved the images of the sea, and of the glittering towers of Orleans II that have been abandoned or taken over by gangs. The clipper ships are another really cool concept, and as a reader I could very much relate to Nailer's desire to sail on them.

I enjoyed the story and characters as well. The storyline is fast-paced and engaging, and the characters feel very realistic. You get the sense that sometimes it is really not in their best interest to do the heroic thing, given their precarious and poverty-stricken situations, which have led them to believe that they will literally probably die if they don't look out for their own self interests at all times. Yet at the same time they form bonds between them that allow them to justify doing the "right" thing. There is always a good reason for their actions, and thus they never seem unrealistically heroic. The interactions between the wealthy heroine and poor hero were pretty interesting; I liked seeing how they started off not trusting each other, and gradually came to more of an understanding.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes futuristic settings, adventure stories or young adult fiction. It's great!

Okay, let me preface this by saying that I always wish that more kids wrote/gave reviews of kid's books. It's great if adults like them.....but we are not the target audience. So, felt compelled to share my son's opinion. I'm a youth librarian at a public library with a limited budget. I ordered Ship Breaker from another library & asked my son (6th gr.) if he would be interested in reading it and giving me his opinion on whether or not we should get it.

Here it is:
"Mom, this book is awesome. The library HAS to order it. It's so exciting that I couldn't stop reading it and I read it through two whole class periods (yeah, not really what mom wanted to hear). The second half is soooo exciting with all the fighting and adventure and you never were sure about his father! Can you get the next book?"

In other words, he really liked it alot, and is recommending it his friends!

Ship Breaker is a young adult, post-apocalyptic, science fiction novel from Paolo Bacigalupi. The titular character is Nailer, a teenager who lives (barely) and works (hard) on one of the polluted coasts of North America.

Nailer is part of one of many hundreds of crews that swarm over derelict ships and dismantle them for their raw components. In the post-greenhouse-meltdown world, resources are scarce - if it weren't for the crews, there'd be no materials left at all.

Nailer's world is a brutal one. The crews are part of a nasty, feudal society. Teens like Nailer are caught between roles - growing too big to crawl through ducts in search of valuable wire, but not big enough to join the adults that dismantle heavy machinery. There's nowhere to fit in and, of course, no escape.

Nailer's luck takes a turn for the better when he makes a massive find. One of the newfangled, "swank" clipper ships has washed ashore. The only thing that stands between Nailer and valuable, life-changing salvage? The near-dead young girl that he founds on board.

Fortunately, this being a young adult book, so Nailer does the right thing. Also, she's hot.

Nailer and Nita (his pretty new friend from the right side of the tracks) are forced to run. As well as being pursued by Nita's high-class corporate enemies and Nailer's low-class gangland foes, they have to deal with the brutal facts of life in their ruined world. Any infection is potentially lethal. A rat makes for a good meal. Half-dogs roam the streets as corporate assassins (ok, the last is a little far-fetched, but give the author credit for having a bit of fun). Bacigalupi's future is a bleak and uninviting one.

Ship Breaker is, ultimately, a good story, if not a particularly insightful one. It dances near serious themes, but then sashays away at the last minute. There aren't really a lot of problems that aren't quickly resolved in the next chapter, and most personal relationships don't get explored any more deeply than a confession of "liking" (or even "not liking"). Nailer's world is divided into good people and bad people. Occasionally there's a bit of drama when a bad person turns out to be a good person, but that doesn't happen often enough to be a source of real anxiety for anyone involved. It all concludes in a surprisingly upbeat fairy-tale ending that defies current trends in young adult genre fiction - daring to give the reader satisfaction instead of setting up the gloomy sequel.

Ship Breaker isn't a flawless book by any means. Bacigalupi tends to wax preachy when it comes to the use and abuse of natural resources. Agree or disagree, he lays it on a bit thick and interrupts his own storytelling. Having a world with The Orleans (and "The Orleans 2" and two other cities on the same spot) all destroyed by "city killer" hurricanes - all caused by the stripping of barrier islands - is shamefully heavy-handed. Similarly, the characters all become uncharacteristically chatty when the topic of consumerism comes to the fore.

Ship Breaker is, largely, an old-fashioned Boy's Own adventure. A young man goes in search of his fortune and, after proving himself morally righteous, finds it. It is a tried and true formula, and one that the author adopts well. An enjoyable book - just one that sometimes gets distracted by another agenda.