Do You Judge a Book by its Cover?

Paolo Bacigalupi wrote Ship Breaker, in the year 2010. The same year that Bacigalupi wrote Ship Breaker it was a finalist for the National Book Award. The story starts out with a young boy named Nailer, who lives in a poor family and works light crew on broken down cargo ships. Nailer always aspired to do bigger and better things unlike the rest of the crewmen. Nailer had always dreamed about working on a clipper ship, which was a sleek cargo ship capable of navigating the seas at high speeds. Nailer was so small that they sent him in the cargo ducts to crawl, and remove copper wires, but anything that was valuable would do. Living on the southern coast of the Louisiana the people are accustomed to hurricanes. On a normal night a hurricane comes in and destroys all of the crews houses, and bring another ship aboard the shore. The story really kicks off when they find Lucky Girl still alive in her magnificent ship. The story takes places a few hours down the coast from a postmodern New Orleans, where the glaciers have all melted due to global warming and Orleans was flooded leaving, Old Orleans and the New Orleans. This is considered one of the main hubs in the shipbreaking industry. In the book there are a few characters that we learn about that oversee corporate entities; while the majority who are poor do the foulest of jobs to have a chance of surviving day to day. The dividend between the rich and poor is extreme. Bacigalupi uses words that can be easily understood by all teenagers, his main focus was to write for the teenagers. I feel like this is a great book for teens to read, because I feel like it can help pull them out of a dystopian state, and lead them to believe that things could be worse, and you have to be happy and live everyday like it is your last.