Hey, guys!
Sorry that I haven't posted in the past couple of days, but I was breezing through another of my library books: Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi . . . okay, I was playing Farcry 3 too. But I've only ever played it once! And the second time doesn't count; I hadn't finished the game that time. It just wiped my game when I was so close to finishing.
But what can you do? That's why I'm playing a game. Like I said before, once I find a game I like, I play it until I'm sick of it.
I'm getting off track, though. I promise I'm not writing another post about video games. My mind just gets away from me sometimes.
Anyway, back to Ship Breaker. It's a young adult sci-fi novel, and it actually reminds me a bit of James Dashner in that it is action-packed and grips you until the very last page. Otherwise, Bacigalupi's voice is entirely different from Dashner's, although their main characters are a bit similar.
Also, there isn't a weird monster/genetic alteration thing around every corner. The only one of those present in Ship Breaker are the half-men, which are genetically engineered animals built to be bodyguards, a combination of human, dog, tiger, and hyena DNA.
So anyway, I'm getting off topic again.
The main character is Nailer, son of a dead mother and an abusive drunk and addict of a father. So, essentially, Nailer's only family is his lifelong friend and boss, Pima, and her mother, Sadna. Nailer lives on Bright Sands Beach as a ship breaker. This means that he works in a crew to dismantle old ship that have washed up on the beach and to scavenge them for their reusable parts.
While heavy crew works with sledgehammers to work the old iron and steel that can be smelted and recycled, Nailer works light crew. He's so small that he can fit in the old ventilation system to collect the copper wires to make his quota. It's a dangerous job, but you don't want to get cut off the job and have to turn to harvesting your own body parts for money.
After injuring himself on the job, Nailer has caught a lucky break. A huge storm rolls in from the sea and keeps his crew out of work, meaning that he has a chance to heal up before he has to go back into the ducts.
But he doesn't realize until the storm is upon them that the hurricane is a city-killer. Huts are swept off the beach like they're nothing and the citizens are forced to move to high ground for shelter for two days.
While searching for food along the beach, Nailer and Pima cross over to an island during low tide and come upon a wrecked clipper ship. For ship breakers, that means one thing: scavenge. Aboard the ship, they find all kinds of pickings: gold, brass, and silver that can be smelted on the beach as long as they're smart and claim the scavenge for themselves.
They aren't very surprised when they find corpses floating on board, but when they find a girl trapped under her furniture and still breathing, Pima and Nailer are torn between slitting her throat to take her jewelry and letting her live and collecting a reward.
What will Nailer choose? What role will this girl play in his life? Read and find out. You know how much I hate spoilers.
I definitely recommend this book for anyone who loves sci-fi. My boyfriend read it before I did and recommended it to me. And I loved it. So why not give it a shot.
Hope you guys enjoyed this review. Check in again within the next couple of days for another review or list. Next on my reading list is the last library book I took out, which is The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray by Chris Wooding. Then I'll finish reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel and Pet Sematary by Stephen King. And many more to come after that.
Happy reading!!
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