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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
Companion to: Ship Breaker
Summary: In a dark future America that has devolved into unending civil wars, orphans Mahlia and Mouse barely escape the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities, but their fragile safety is soon threatened and Mahlia will have to risk everything if she is to save Mouse, as he once saved her.
This story reminds me a little of "Lord of the Flies" but gone wild. Violent and tragic, but still moving.
Summary: In a dark future America that has devolved into unending civil wars, orphans Mahlia and Mouse barely escape the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities, but their fragile safety is soon threatened and Mahlia will have to risk everything if she is to save Mouse, as he once saved her.
This story reminds me a little of "Lord of the Flies" but gone wild. Violent and tragic, but still moving.
The Drowned Cities has its moments, but the characters are caustic. I get that it's a violent post-apocalypse scenario, but I never found myself cheering them on. Tool (a genetically engineered wolf/dog/hyena/man) is the main character across THREE books (with this being the interlude) and he comes across as smart but without a character arc and no real personality. As for Mahlia rescuing Mouse/Ghost, there was never any real heart. At one point, she lies, kidnaps and threatens to kill a teen so as to get someone to ferry her down the river. Then she releases him and pretends everything's fine. Tool slips over the side of the boat to hide as they pass some guards, warning that if the teen or the guide alerts the soldiers, he'll kill them before killing the soldiers. And all this is just glossed over as okay and justified. Would Mahlia or Tool actually kill these guys? Doesn't that make them as bad as the bad guys? Don't our protagonists have ANY redeeming qualities? Can't they appeal to reason? Can't they rally people to their cause? I'm 3/4 of the way through, but I doubt I'll finish.
adventurous
dark
hopeful
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
I wanted to like this more than I did, but I could never really make a connection to hte characters. I felt a bit distant, and it felt similar in some ways to The Windup Girl. Bacigalupi has some interesting world building, and he's obviously thought his world through, but there was just something missing for me. Plus, I thought the pacing was a little weird in this one.
For whatever reason, it was just not as enjoyable as I thought it would be.
For whatever reason, it was just not as enjoyable as I thought it would be.
I couldn't remember the characters in the first book well enough to be able to tell if any of them were linked to those in this book. It's more of a companion novel from what I can tell. Tool, one of the most fascinating characters from the first novel, Ship Breakers is the one constant. This is a story that exemplifies the futility of war, and magnifies its destruction, and violence. It's also a story of honor, faithfulness, friendship, and family. It was pretty good, but a little too bloody for my taste.
I couldn't put it down.
4.5 stars, nearly tipped to a 5.**
Tense, gritty, and real.
Unfortunately, too real, which is a rarity in science fiction these days. I've said of Ship Breaker, to which this is a prequel companion novel, that it's the most realistic and believable science fiction I've read in a long time. The same can be said of this one, as it takes place a bit earlier in the same possible future (with the shared secondary character Tool), a world catastrophically changed by global warming flooding and related economic collapse.
The Drowned Cities have been abandoned by the rest of the world as unsalvagable,* a violent war zone where children kill each other at the order of the warlords fighting for control. Because the only option is to kill or be killed, and the only hope is to stay alive for another day and then maybe another. Almost no one lasts long enough to actually reach adulthood. The international peacekeepers gave up after 15 years of trying, and now there is no order or safety or sanity. Mahlia, a refugee "cast-off" left behind by her peacekeeper father along with her Drowned Cities mother, has to figure out what it will take to survive and decide if she is willing to become that person.
*Unsalvagable as a civilization, that is, but that doesn't stop international companies from paying the warlords for access to what remains of the collapsed civilization's salvage, historical artifacts for collectors and raw materials from decaying structures.
**The only reason it's not is because it was almost too fast and full of action, that it left me wishing it had been just a bit denser.
-----
Behind him, a couple of his troops stood waiting. War maggots. Didn't even have hair on their upper lips. Mean-ass licebiters with guns, probably high on red rippers, probably crazy. One had a shotgun, the other a hunting rifle, not just machetes or acid, which meant they were probably bloodthirsty, especially if they were standing bodyguard on the grown-up. Boys with guns scared her. Guns gave them swagger, and swagger made them vicious.
-----
Mahlia took the shotgun anyway. Stood up, hefting it and smiling. Damn, it felt good to hold a weapon. Not just some machete that you could never get close enough to show what for. She couldn't ring-fight a soldier boy, but she could blow his head off just fine.
The gun felt solid in her hand, reassuring. Powerful. She could stand tall with a weapon like this.
No wonder soldier boys had so much damn swagger. With a gun under your arm, you walked tall. If she'd had a gun when the soldier boys caught her the first time, everything would have been different.
-----
She thought that she'd been surviving. She thought that she'd been fighting for herself. But all she'd done was create more killing, and in the end it had all led to this moment, where they bargained with a demon of the Drowned Cities, not for their lives, but for their souls.
"Fight the patriotic fight," Stern said. "Smash the Army of God."
But what he meant was keep on killing. If you wanted to stay alive, you had to keep on killing.
4.5 stars, nearly tipped to a 5.**
Tense, gritty, and real.
Unfortunately, too real, which is a rarity in science fiction these days. I've said of Ship Breaker, to which this is a prequel companion novel, that it's the most realistic and believable science fiction I've read in a long time. The same can be said of this one, as it takes place a bit earlier in the same possible future (with the shared secondary character Tool), a world catastrophically changed by global warming flooding and related economic collapse.
The Drowned Cities have been abandoned by the rest of the world as unsalvagable,* a violent war zone where children kill each other at the order of the warlords fighting for control. Because the only option is to kill or be killed, and the only hope is to stay alive for another day and then maybe another. Almost no one lasts long enough to actually reach adulthood. The international peacekeepers gave up after 15 years of trying, and now there is no order or safety or sanity. Mahlia, a refugee "cast-off" left behind by her peacekeeper father along with her Drowned Cities mother, has to figure out what it will take to survive and decide if she is willing to become that person.
*Unsalvagable as a civilization, that is, but that doesn't stop international companies from paying the warlords for access to what remains of the collapsed civilization's salvage, historical artifacts for collectors and raw materials from decaying structures.
**The only reason it's not is because it was almost too fast and full of action, that it left me wishing it had been just a bit denser.
-----
Behind him, a couple of his troops stood waiting. War maggots. Didn't even have hair on their upper lips. Mean-ass licebiters with guns, probably high on red rippers, probably crazy. One had a shotgun, the other a hunting rifle, not just machetes or acid, which meant they were probably bloodthirsty, especially if they were standing bodyguard on the grown-up. Boys with guns scared her. Guns gave them swagger, and swagger made them vicious.
-----
Mahlia took the shotgun anyway. Stood up, hefting it and smiling. Damn, it felt good to hold a weapon. Not just some machete that you could never get close enough to show what for. She couldn't ring-fight a soldier boy, but she could blow his head off just fine.
The gun felt solid in her hand, reassuring. Powerful. She could stand tall with a weapon like this.
No wonder soldier boys had so much damn swagger. With a gun under your arm, you walked tall. If she'd had a gun when the soldier boys caught her the first time, everything would have been different.
-----
She thought that she'd been surviving. She thought that she'd been fighting for herself. But all she'd done was create more killing, and in the end it had all led to this moment, where they bargained with a demon of the Drowned Cities, not for their lives, but for their souls.
"Fight the patriotic fight," Stern said. "Smash the Army of God."
But what he meant was keep on killing. If you wanted to stay alive, you had to keep on killing.
So, I thought this was a sequel, but it's a companion book. I also thought it was going to be way longer because there was a bunch of extra material at the end of the book that was interviews and samples of other books so, percentage-wise on the kindle I thought there was a lot more book to go (the book proper finished at around 62%). I think had my expectations been different, I may have liked it better, but as it stands, it was ok. A good story, to be sure, and I love that we got to know more about the character Tool.
This dystopian/post-apocalyptic novel hit home more than ever with our current President. Several passages within these pages were WAY too true and it's frightening. Bacigalupi did an excellent job writing in the voice of the main character, Mahlia and the struggles she went through to stay alive in the war torn America. Full of heartache and triumph, this was a fantastic read!
