Ship Breaker

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I wanted to give this book a 3.5, but I rounded up today.

I got about 1/3 through the book before taking a break of a month or so. The story was so dark, with few redeeming values at the time. I got started again mainly because I scanned ahead and decided that I needed to read the part about Orleans, my current place of residence. Interestingly, it's only in the second half of the book that you start to get the back story about the world in which Ship Breaker takes place. In this milieu, the southern U.S. has devolved into a Third World country that supplies the world with resources (yeah, even more so than it is now) and most of the population lives in poverty under the rule of thugs. Think the Congo with half-man/half-dog hybrids. What happened: It seems that all of those predictions about climate change were realized in Bacigalupi's world. Meanwhile, Canada, India, and China are the benevolent superpowers using the U.S. as a colony. For some reason, this extra information that turns the current geopolitical situation on its head made the rest of the novel more palatable to me.

Ship Breaker has a strong, evocative story that moves along quickly. It's emotional without being angry or sappy. The ending is appropriately ambiguous. It all works.



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