Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi, 2010.
NY: Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group.

The author of the Eragon series has given tweens and teens another great book.  This one has a science fiction theme in that it takes place in the not-too-distant future, after global warming has taken its toll on the Earth.  It gives us a glimpse of the impending poverty that runs rampant, rule by multinational corporations, and a chasm between the rich and the rest of humanity.  But mostly it is a story of how a young teen is able to remain true to principles of human goodness that dominate the choices he makes even when the easier course of action would keep him safer or more comfortable.

The world in which Nailer lives is brutal and almost feudal.  He lives somewhere along the new coast line of the Gulf of Mexico, and works by scavenging copper wiring, other desirable metals, and pockets of trapped petroleum from the remains of old oil tankers that have been abandoned and left to float along the Gulf shores.  Nailer knows he may soon grow too big to continue this job, as it requires smallness, agility, strength and a certain degree of contortionist qualities.  It is dangerous work, with little or no safety equipment.  Workers rely on each other to meet quotas and, often, to stay alive.  This results in a code among work teams; those who break the code suffer grave consequences.

Nailer has another problem: a tough-as-nails hard-drinking, drug-using father whose moods are as difficult to predict as the formation and quickness of city-destroying storms that are part of the changed Earth: "Sober, the man was scary.  Drunk, he was a demon."  Pima, Nailer's best friend, and her mother, however, are stabilizing influences in his life, and because of them--and his relationship to his notoriously brutal and quick-tempered father--he has gained a reputation for integrity with the local population.

Then one day, after a particularly brutal storm that stopped work for several days and leveled the shanty town to the ground, Nailer and Pima make a discovery: a modern clipper ship has been smashed by the storm, just off the coast of a small island that is only accessible by a land bridge during low tide.  They decide to try to scavenge as much as they can before a boss claims the ship as his or her own salvage site.  Just as they are about to leave with what bounty they could carry, Nailer discovers that a girl in her fancy stateroom is still alive.  Pima urges him to leave the "swank" and let her die, but Nailer's moral code does not allow him to do so.  Between the two of them, the girl is saved.

The morning after saving "Lucky Girl," however, Nailer's father and his crew discover the ship and board it to claim everything that is valuable, including the salvage Nailer and Pima intended to hide.  To make matters worse, merchant representatives have been asking after the swank girl, offering a huge reward for information leading to her apprehension.  One thing leads to another, resulting in Nailer and Lucky Girl running for their lives with help from an unlikely source.

This is a good read, even for adults.  Because it predicts occurrences and inventions in the future, it is "hard" science fiction--the kind that is based on scientific facts and predictions, not the kind that deals with invasions by alien life forms.  It deals with issues of environment and the effects on the human condition without lecturing on either.  Like much modern good writing for young adults, issues of life, death, survival, choices and morality are not repressed or glossed over.  Ship Breaker may be a stand-alone book at this time, but I would love to see it broadened into a saga--or at least a trilogy!!

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