Ship Breaker

Ship Breaker
by Paolo Bacigalupi
Little, Brown, 2010. 323 pgs. Young Adult Fiction.

On the Gulf Coast in a dystopian future, Nailer, a teenage boy, works "light crew" for a salvage operation, pulling and stripping copper wire from grounded vessels to meet the quotas set by his ruthless crew chief. After a hurricane stops work for a day, Nailer and a friend find a salvageman's dream--a clipper ship exquisitely engineered for sailing and loaded with loot. But one young woman is alive on the ship. Should they kill her so the ship can be claimed as salvage? Or let her live for the reward and a chance at a better life that she promises her father will give them? Nailer makes his choice, a risky decision in a society that almost exclusively values survival and getting ahead over any degree of compassion or fellow feeling. Though his only remaining blood kin is his father, a brutal addict, Nailer manages to cobble together something of a family for himself among the ruins of New Orleans, thrice-built, thrice-destroyed. Ship Breaker is a fine adventure novel, filled with danger and suspense, but it has even more to say about what is truly valuable and what is not.