Ship Breaker

     I am currently reading the book Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. The book is set on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in the near future. In the book, global warming and frequent, intense hurricanes have rendered most of today’s means of transportation unusable, and there are many ships, mostly oil tankers, washed up on the beaches of the Gulf. On these ships are people called ship breakers, paupers who sleep in ramshackle huts and shelters made out of sticks and leaves during the night and work at extracting valuable materials (copper, steel, oil, etc.) from the ships. The ship breakers are divided into two categories: heavy crew (strong adults and teenagers), who carry heavy materials and pieces of the ships’ hulls, and light crew (children and small teenagers), who crawl on the insides of the ships to find smaller things like copper wire. In contrast to the poor ship breakers are the rich inhabitants of cities, who travel in fast “clipper ships” that use the jet stream for wind power. So far in the book, there hasn’t been much about the rich. The main character of the book is a light crewman in his early teens (his exact age hasn’t been revealed) named Nailer Lopez. When Nailer is working in a ship’s air ducts, the duct collapses and he falls into a pool of oil. When another member of his crew, Sloth, finds him, she leaves him there to drown so she can have the oil for herself. However, Nailer manages to swim down and open a door in the side of the ship, which lets the oil out and he falls into the water. Sloth is then fired from the crew, and Nailer breaks his arm falling into the water.

     So far, Ship Breaker has been a fairly fast-paced book with compelling characters and an interesting view of the future. I would recommend it.