And basically the essential question of every teenager, too.
Which is, of course, the essential question of every dystopia. I found it a tad colourless in places, but Nailer is a fine hero, complicated and questioning, always wondering whether he's doomed to inherit his father's failings or whether he can make his own destiny. It's a taut, disciplined novel, moving with tremendous coiled energy and urgency. With Ship Breaker, they're in luck.īacigalupi is a highly acclaimed adult sci-fi writer, and Ship Breaker won last year's prestigious Printz award for young-adult fiction in the US. Teenagers care less, I find, about the set-up of a dystopic world (though it has to be cool, naturally) than for the hero within it and how they have to act against it. Which is what every decision feels like as a teenager, where every choice is life or death against impossible, entirely unfair odds. His hesitation will have ever-expanding consequences for everyone. Unlike his father, he can't bring himself to kill for callous reasons. Pima wants to humanely finish her off, because the cataclysm Nita could bring down on them is all too terrible. Nita is in terrible danger from rival clans who want to use her to control her powerful father. The body of the beautiful young owner, who turns out to not be quite so dead after all. Nailer and Pima find enough treasure inside to free them for ever.īut they find something else, too. He and Pima happen upon a newly wrecked "clipper", a ship of the super-rich that should never have come this close to shore. One day, a hurricane brings what could be a lucky strike beyond Nailer's wildest dreams. Nailer dreams of a lucky strike: a forgotten barrel of crude oil or stash of gold in the bowels of a wreck that will allow him to buy his way out of his own serfdom, and possibly also the indentures of his friend Pima and her mother Sadna, who are more family to him than his father is. He is unlikely to grow strong enough to be taken on to "heavy crew" when he gets older, and his father, Richard Lopez, is a terrifying, murderous, drug-addled nightmare. Nailer is a ship breaker, still small enough, for now, to be on "light crew" – pulling valuable copper wire out of the now-obsolete oil tankers that litter the coast.
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