Review Breaker
May. 6th, 2010 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
So I clipped through to the end of Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi last night. Bacigalupi wrote The Windup Girl which I rather enjoyed and this is a YA book set in the same, or very similar universe.
The quick take is that the oil is gone and the environment has gone haywire. City-killer hurricanes savage the gulf on a regular basis. The protagonist is a young teenager named Nailer. He lives in a shanty town on a gulf coast beach with his abusive, junkie father and works as a part of a salvage crew. He's small and wiry and crawls through the duct-work of derelict tankers looking for copper wire to scavenge. It's hard work and he knows that once he gets too big for this he probably won't be big enough to work the "heavy crew" taking out the steel of the ship and things will get very rough indeed.
Following a storm, Nailer discovers the wreck of a clipper ship -- a lucky strike that will make his fortune. There follow some complications.
It's YA so it's a pretty quick read and there's a bit of Horatio Alger in the hero's story, but there's also a bit more meat on the bone than, say any Tom Swift Jr. story I've read so far. Certainly, Bacipgalupi is in his element writing about how people cope with a post-peak, global warming world and how very hard it is for folks on the bottom rungs. Overall it was a pretty good read.
later
Tom
So I clipped through to the end of Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi last night. Bacigalupi wrote The Windup Girl which I rather enjoyed and this is a YA book set in the same, or very similar universe.
The quick take is that the oil is gone and the environment has gone haywire. City-killer hurricanes savage the gulf on a regular basis. The protagonist is a young teenager named Nailer. He lives in a shanty town on a gulf coast beach with his abusive, junkie father and works as a part of a salvage crew. He's small and wiry and crawls through the duct-work of derelict tankers looking for copper wire to scavenge. It's hard work and he knows that once he gets too big for this he probably won't be big enough to work the "heavy crew" taking out the steel of the ship and things will get very rough indeed.
Following a storm, Nailer discovers the wreck of a clipper ship -- a lucky strike that will make his fortune. There follow some complications.
It's YA so it's a pretty quick read and there's a bit of Horatio Alger in the hero's story, but there's also a bit more meat on the bone than, say any Tom Swift Jr. story I've read so far. Certainly, Bacipgalupi is in his element writing about how people cope with a post-peak, global warming world and how very hard it is for folks on the bottom rungs. Overall it was a pretty good read.
later
Tom
