I just blazed through Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and I really regret having to leave that world. I want to go back along Bright Sands Beach and revisit all those wonderful people I met that are struggling through such hard lives.
The author vividly paints the small microcosm that is the life of the ship breakers and successfully creates a culture based on past histories of coastal towns and cities. In this world, a ship breaker is a person employed by one of the few surviving corporate entities to salvage wrecked ships savaged by storms known as “city killers.”
The world Bacigalupi reveals in the novel is heartbreaking, but anyone who has read history will quickly grasp the giant backward step he makes in this dark future. The book is aimed at the older YA audience, probably eighth grade and up in my opinion, but adults (like me) will enjoy the headlong adventure as well.
Nailer, the main character who was really named that, is 14 or 15 years old. He works with a “light crew,” a group responsible for slithering down through the ducts of old ships in search of copper wiring and other salvageable items. The opening chapter establishes his job as well as the danger that he faces every day, and makes him a sympathetic character in the course of a few pages.
I loved the “backward” science of the book. The phosphorescent paint Nailer puts on his forehead to navigate the darkness so he can leave both hands free to salvage and save himself was incredibly neat, and something that I wouldn’t have thought of. The author provides a lot of touches like this.
Ship Breaker concentrates on the low-tech coastal life for the most part, and I missed getting a better view of the inland world. Of course, Nailer didn’t know much about that world either, so it was fair. However, I can’t help wishing that Bacigalupi returns to Nailer’s world soon and presents us with another intriguing look at this proposed future.
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