Ship Breaker

I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

I had a really hard time deciding the rating for this. It was so close to being spectacular, but I felt it didn't reach its full potential. It lacked that emotional punch I was expecting after reading the first 100 pages or so, however it's still one of my favorite books as it's one of the better dystopian books out there.

The prose was splendid. I was hooked from the first pages. You know you're really loving a book when you wake up in the morning and the first thing that pops into you head is how much you enjoyed reading that book before you went to bed the previous night. The novel is a fast-paced, nail-bitting coming of age adventure story. Just the thought of this gloomy future where most of the resources are gone and most of the people live in extreme poverty while risking their lives constantly by facing mega storms and doing awfully arduous and dangerous jobs is nerve wrecking.

I was fascinated by the universe of the ship-breakers on Bright Sands Beach. The cast of characters was neatly composed by people in all kind of sizes, colors and mentalities. No one in this book is a particularly likeable character, but this doesn't take away from the story. The novel explores quite well how people lose their sense of humanity in the face of adversity. They are all willing to do awful things to survive or get ahead, but each of them has a different breaking point. Out of all the characters Nailer was the most humane. Throughout the entire novel, he is torn between doing what's best for him and what is right. Prima is very loyal, but only to the people she considers crew. She and her mother are more family to Nailer than his drug addict abhorrent father ever was. My favorite character was Tool, the half-human, partially because he was mysterious, but mostly because he was proof that your life is not decided only by your “Fates”, yet also by your choices.

This captivating novel lost some of its pull on me after Nita came into the picture. I didn't feel her character had substance. She's described as pretty, delicate and rich many times throughout the book, but nothing else. I just wish there was more to her that would justify people risking their lives for her, repeatedly. She didn't need to live so the world could be saved from the villain. She just needed to not be captured. Therefore, I wanted some better reasons for why all those people (especially Nailer) were so loyal to her. I didn't like that, at about three fourths of the way through this story, the focus shifted from Nailer to Nita. Suddenly it was all about saving her and not about Nailer's transformation, which I didn't expect. The ending was also not as satisfying as I'd hoped.

Nevertheless, I think Paolo Bacigalupi is a talented writer and I'm excited about reading some of his other books.

Hmm. I wanted to read this because it was this year's Printz winner, but it didn't really sound like my kind of book. My fondness for the Hunger Games aside, I'm generally not a huge fan of dystopias, especially ones where children have impossibly grim hopeless lives. The kids in Ship Breaker climb through the ducts and stuff of shipwrecks, stripping them of copper wire and stuff, until they get too big (around age 15 or so) and then either get a bigger job, become a prostitute, or starve to death basically. WOO HOO.

That said, I got more into it than I expected. Especially once they left the beach (and things got a little less hopeless). The characters are good, the action is exciting and page-turning, and the world is well-built. It's just pretty grim.

I notice this is Ship Breaker #1 and I have to say I would probably read the sequel–I like where the story ended and I'm very interested to know more about Tool. It seemed like Bacigalupi was hinting at a much bigger story for him–I'll be very disappointed if he's not in the sequel.