January is always a nice month for books since the ALA announces many of their awards at the annual midwinter meeting. Among these is one of my favorites, the Printz Award for best Young Adult title. This year's winner is Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. Finalists include Stolen by Lucy Christopher, Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King, Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick, and Nothing by Janne Teller.
I suspect there are lots of librarians who, like me, give themselves credit for having selected these books for their collection sometime before the awards are announced -- a little metric of the ability to glean what's really good from the various review sources. This year my fellow librarians and I were 4 for 5, which felt pretty good. Sadly, I hadn't actually read them, but I'm starting to make up for that. I recently finished Ship Breaker and while I thought it was good, I'm not convinced it's as good as previous winners. (I make an exception to Libba Bray's Going Bovine, the lure of which I missed completely.) I also wonder how it measures up against the field of finalists, but will have to reserve judgment until I've read them all.
Ship Breaker is set on a post environmental apocalyptic gulf coast beach -- a little spooky, since Bacigalupi must have dreamed this up sometime before last year's oil spill. Nailer is a young scavenger of anything of value from the chemically saturated and rusting tankers that wash up on the reef. It's dangerous and ugly work that affords the small, lawless beach society little more than a day to day existence.
Bacigalupi adds an interesting twist to a world that's bereft of resources, however. His global demise does not crush everyone -- only the folks who can't afford to buy their way out of subsistence living. This other half, known by Nailer and his ilk as the Swanks, intersects with scavenging life only when one of their high tech clipper ships skims past on the horizon. Hence, Nailer and his crewmate Pima are feeling very lucky when they come upon the wreck of a clipper abound with treasure. Also aboard, however, is Nita and that changes everything.
When Nailer and Pima find the barely alive Nita, they immediately consider killing her in order to preserve their claim on the clipper. If Bacigalupi hadn't set up the terror and precariousness of Nailer's existence so well, we'd find ourselves unsympathetic to the dilemma of offing Nita or not. But, indeed, we are. Getting rid of Nita is squarely in the best interest of two young people forced to live an unlivable life. It's to Bacigalupi's credit, too, that we are not convinced -- even though reasonable plot progression predicts otherwise -- that they won't kill her.
They don't. Instead, they rescue her and so begins a tale of flight, chase and evasion. The plot continues to hold up admirably and the characters are reasonably drawn but the gritty clip with which Bacigalupi masterfully launches his novel has lost its edge. None of Bacigalupi's subsequent settings or events are as well refined or described in equally exacting prose. I finished just short of the ending over a weekend but was never desperate to finish up the last 30 pages. When I did -- around Wednesday -- I realized the end of the novel had fallen off the mark. I'll give Bacigalupi, credit, however. It was his mark; he set it high and sustained it for a healthy half.
Too harsh an assessment? Possibly. Still, both Marlina Marchetta's Jellicoe Road and Geraldine McCaughrean'sThe White Darkness (Printz winners 2009 and 2008 respectively) do a better job depicting and sustaining inner turmoil than Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker -- something I think should be essential for a Printz award.
I suspect there are lots of librarians who, like me, give themselves credit for having selected these books for their collection sometime before the awards are announced -- a little metric of the ability to glean what's really good from the various review sources. This year my fellow librarians and I were 4 for 5, which felt pretty good. Sadly, I hadn't actually read them, but I'm starting to make up for that. I recently finished Ship Breaker and while I thought it was good, I'm not convinced it's as good as previous winners. (I make an exception to Libba Bray's Going Bovine, the lure of which I missed completely.) I also wonder how it measures up against the field of finalists, but will have to reserve judgment until I've read them all.
Ship Breaker is set on a post environmental apocalyptic gulf coast beach -- a little spooky, since Bacigalupi must have dreamed this up sometime before last year's oil spill. Nailer is a young scavenger of anything of value from the chemically saturated and rusting tankers that wash up on the reef. It's dangerous and ugly work that affords the small, lawless beach society little more than a day to day existence.
Bacigalupi adds an interesting twist to a world that's bereft of resources, however. His global demise does not crush everyone -- only the folks who can't afford to buy their way out of subsistence living. This other half, known by Nailer and his ilk as the Swanks, intersects with scavenging life only when one of their high tech clipper ships skims past on the horizon. Hence, Nailer and his crewmate Pima are feeling very lucky when they come upon the wreck of a clipper abound with treasure. Also aboard, however, is Nita and that changes everything.
When Nailer and Pima find the barely alive Nita, they immediately consider killing her in order to preserve their claim on the clipper. If Bacigalupi hadn't set up the terror and precariousness of Nailer's existence so well, we'd find ourselves unsympathetic to the dilemma of offing Nita or not. But, indeed, we are. Getting rid of Nita is squarely in the best interest of two young people forced to live an unlivable life. It's to Bacigalupi's credit, too, that we are not convinced -- even though reasonable plot progression predicts otherwise -- that they won't kill her.
They don't. Instead, they rescue her and so begins a tale of flight, chase and evasion. The plot continues to hold up admirably and the characters are reasonably drawn but the gritty clip with which Bacigalupi masterfully launches his novel has lost its edge. None of Bacigalupi's subsequent settings or events are as well refined or described in equally exacting prose. I finished just short of the ending over a weekend but was never desperate to finish up the last 30 pages. When I did -- around Wednesday -- I realized the end of the novel had fallen off the mark. I'll give Bacigalupi, credit, however. It was his mark; he set it high and sustained it for a healthy half.
Too harsh an assessment? Possibly. Still, both Marlina Marchetta's Jellicoe Road and Geraldine McCaughrean'sThe White Darkness (Printz winners 2009 and 2008 respectively) do a better job depicting and sustaining inner turmoil than Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker -- something I think should be essential for a Printz award.
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