Last week, while up in Auckland, a few people praised Paolo Bacigalupi’s new YA novel, Ship Breaker, to me.

As you may recall from earlier in the year and from my guest posts on the Hugo Award fiction finalists on Out of this Eos, I loved Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl—and in fact it was my pick to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year. (In the end, the Hugo was shared by The Windup Girl and China Mieville’s The City & the City, my second choice.)

So I was really pleased to get a copy of Ship Breaker and began it while on holiday, but have been finishing it over the rest of the intervening week.

Do I love it as much as I loved The Windup Girl? Not quite—but I still like it a lot. Both books are dystopian science fiction set in a medium-future world where the end of oil (is “peak oil” the right phrase?) and climate change have wreaked their havoc. Bacigalupi’s vision of that world is as well-realized and compelling in Ship Breaker as it is in The Windup Girl—and I enjoyed the future technology vision of the clipper ships, juxtaposed with the brutality and grunge of the ship breaking community and post climate change “Orleans.”

The Ship Breaker plot includes a little piratical action thrown in with the dystopian realism—perhaps not quite swashbuckling, but close—which gives the story a “lift” that I think teens (and readers of all ages) will enjoy. And I personally found the dystopian storytelling more realistic than in Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting-Go—which I enjoyed for other reasons, but found some plot elements just a tad implausible.

As with The Windup Girl though, it is the characters that make the Ship Breaker story: the boy Nailer and his relationship with his violent, drug addicted father; his friendship with Pima, a fellow “Light Crew” ship breaker and her mother, “Heavy Crew” Sadna, and the advent in their lives of the clipper-ship heiress “Lucky Girl.” All the ship breaker and related “lowlife” characters were really well realized, but my one quibble was with the heiress, Lucky Girl (Nita.) The circumstances into which she is catapaulted, taking her way, way outside the comfort zone of her privileged upbringing, would—I can’t help feeling—be utterly terrifying. Remembering that dystopian science fiction is primarily “realistic” as opposed to “fantastic”, I didn’t quite get that sense of terror/horror/desperation and I think I needed to.

But as I said, this is only a quibble, espcially as Nita/Lucky Girl still “works” as a character in the overall context of the story. So did I enjoy Ship Breaker? Yes, I did—very much. I definitely put it in the “must-read” category for those who like dystopian scifi and for anyone who likes a good story, well told.