Ship Breaker

The Young Adult Genre suffers from the same problem as my other favorite genre "Zombie Fiction." A reader has to wade through a lot of crap to find the gems of the genre. In YA fiction, a reader has to wade through tons of "Sparkly Vampires" to get to a novel like Pablo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker.

This was an absolutely amazing novel, and the reason is the world building. Reading Ship Breaker was to be completely immersed into a world where the entire most dire Climate Change predictions. The gulf coast of America has been drowned, and to make matters worse most of the fossil fuel has also been depleted. Bacigalupi's rich writing style allowed the reader to experience the less than third world conditions the main character Nailer and his friends live in. Nailer and his clan survive by breaking down abandoned derelict oil tankers into recyclable materials.

In addition to beautiful and tragic world building, Ship Breaker has an amazing cast of characters, all of which are well developed and fully formed. It is amazing and refreshing to see truly powerful women characters in a novel. So often women in YA novels appear to be strong superciliously, but once a reader scrapes the surface, there is just not much there. Not so in this novel. Even "Lucky Girl" who was just a "Swank" showed strength when strength was required. In so many YA novels, she would have been a lilting violet who leaned on her big strong savior to help her survive in this alien environment.

I cannot recommend this novel strongly enough. I have already convinced three of my friends to read this novel. All I will say is try it and you will not be disappointed. I am giving this novel 5 stars something I have not done in a review in a very long time.