I listened to Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" this winter, and since I enjoyed it I wanted something else by him. This Young Adult Literature (YAL) book was a fun read, not as demanding as "The Windup Girl" but set in the same type of world: global-commerce-run-amok leaving ecological and economic disasters in its wake.
"Ship Breaker" takes place on the Gulf Coast of the U.S., or what once was the U.S., where groups of children and young adults work in crews to scavenge everything useful from rusting hulks of ships on the shore. Lucky Boy is small enough to work his way through small passages pulling out copper wire. Loyalty is essential for surviving in the crews, but loyalty is also hard won. Lucky Boy risks his life every time he heads off into the ship to find wire to make his quota.
Dangers abound in Lucky Boy's world, from his volatile father to the crew boss and from fellow crew mates to the work itself. On the other hand, his friend Pima and her mother look out for Lucky Boy. He dreams of finding a scavenge that he can claim for his own and will make his fortune. When that day comes, he want to sail the oceans in his own yacht instead of ripping the guts out of derelict oil tankers.
Lucky Boy's life is turned upside down when he and Pima find a girl in a wrecked yacht on the beach. She is injured, but alive. Should he forget about the girl and make this yacht his "lucky strike?" Why would he try to help her when they have just met? Does she deserve his loyalty? His choices force him to confront his father and flee the crews to head off to a relocated, but still flooded, New Orleans.
Because I have studied how YAL can be used high school literature courses, I tend to review the book in light of how it could be studied in the classroom, and more importantly how what questions arise from the reading that are important for young adults to try to answer. "Ship Breaker" covers some important themes, such as globalization, ecological responsibility, wealth and poverty, loyalty and love. Lucky Boy has dreams of what life could be like, regardless of how stark his life is now. I think this is an opening for talking about knowing what you want to do with your life, and finding ways to do it. But it also raises the question of what is important, and if you had no money or means, what would you do? What do you have in your life now that you wouldn't worry about if you were struggling to live from one day to the next? How important are those things to you if you can live without them?
Again, this was a adventuresome read that wasn't intellectually taxing. It is important when reading Bacigalupi not to get to worked up about the science, he uses science fiction as a literary device without being concerned about feasibility. But just go with it.
Bacigalupi won my heart with "Shipbreaker", but I actually had this book on the shelf not too long before that was released. "Shipbreaker" is for the YA market, and is about a post-petrol America, but that's where the similarities end. "The Windup Girl" is an awful, wonderful future that is SO not for kids, about a new kind of slavery that may await our descendants if we keep going the way we're going. This book just made me love him even more.
ReplyDeleteFor those not comfortable about human trafficking, you probably shouldn't read this book. Well, semi-human trafficking. You get what I mean. But even if you're uneasy, the way Bacigalupi writes it is masterful, and only goes for the jugular with anything that might be considered triggery in the abuse catagory a few times when he could have gone wild with it the entire book. For that I thank him, it made things easier to digest.