Ship Breaker

Ship Breaker is some really solid YA scifi, in a post-climate change world. Nailer is the lowest of the low, a ship breaker on the storm tossed gulf shore. His job is to go into the stinking and deadly bowels of fossil fuel age cargo ships and strip them for valuable metals. He dreams of the horizon, and watches the modern cargo fiber clipper ships sail past, but life is a brutal day to day struggle against starvation, accidental death, and the drug-addicted brutality of his knife-fighter father.

After a storm, Nailer finds a wrecked clipper with a dead rich girl aboard. She could be his ticket to a better life, or a sure death. Drawn into a web of corporate intrigue, Nailer has to escape, find allies, and fight for survival and a better life.

The ethics are YA stock, but the setting has Bacigalupi’s magic touch, and since it’s YA story skips some of the more problematic sexual assault stuff from The Windup Girl.

((also, Book 200 for 2017. #BookRace2017 suckers!))