Published: 2010, Little, Brown and Company
323 pages
Take a look at those medals on the front cover of this book! The gold one is the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. The silver one signifies that it was a finalist for the National Book Award. I first mentioned this book in my post about the ALA Youth Media Award Winners, and I was really excited to see what it had to offer.... Sooo let's take a look...
The book takes place in the future in the American Gulf Coast region, where all the old oil tankers of today have been stranded on the shoreline and are only valuable for their metal innards. Nailer, a teenage boy who works for a particularly harsh boss, spends his days crawling through the ducts of the oil tankers scavenging for copper wiring and his nights worrying about whether he will make it through the night with his drug-addicted, murderous father.
After a rough storm one night, Nailer discovers wreckage from one of the beautiful, expensive sailboats he always admires out on the horizon. In the wreckage is an extremely rich girl, and Nailer must make the decision to simply give her up to his father and the rest of the violent ship breakers or try to protect her. If he didn't try to protect her there wouldn't be much of a plot, so I can tell you now that Nailer runs away with her to "the Orleans," which has been decimated by a series of hurricanes, so she can find her rich family. Nailer and the girl are bombarded with life-threatening obstacles and adventures in the course of their journey, and that is pretty much the whole book.
To be honest, I really expected more from a book that received sooo much praise from the literary community. I was largely unimpressed by the characterization and the plot. The most impressive part was the setting, with Bacigalupi painting such a clear and imaginative (but still semi-believable) future that it was hard not to get sucked in. On the other hand, I wish he went into more depth about some of the finer details. There is something called "the Life Cult," for instance, mentioned several times in the book that he just never really explains. At first I thought he was just trying to keep it mysterious, but then it just got annoying.
I think this book would make an incredible movie, and when it's made into one in the near future, you can all thank me for introducing you to it first. The imagery is fantastic and I actually felt as dirty and sweaty as Nailer when I was reading about him crawling through the ducts of an old tanker. That also could have been the 110 degree weather we've been having, but I'll give Bacigalupi the credit.
P.S. Don't read it. Wait for the movie.
