Day 2 of reading and I have completed
the book, Yes!!! finally It is such a good feeling, well I guess I will start
reading another book, speaking of another book, I am thinking that I will start
Posting of my previous book Stolen so stay in tune for that in my next blog.
Well back to Ship Breaker, yes I have finished my book but I have not completed
my required posing of my book so it might take 1-2 days to finish the entire
posting requirement.
After my previous post, we got
introduce to Nailer and his friends even more Nailer Lopez, also known as Lucky
Boy, is the teenage protagonist of the novel. He works as a ship breaker,
tearing apart old oil tankers to scavenge for copper wiring, metal staples, or
any other material that can be sold on the market. He's been working this job
since he was a young boy, and now, as a teenager, he is getting too big for the
work. Although he's small and scrawny for his age, with ribs that stick out
from under his clothes, there will always be smaller kids queuing up for his
job. Nailer has a few close friends, Pima and her mother Sadna, but since his
mother died of an infection, Nailer doesn't have any family to protect him from
life on the beach. His father, Richard Lopez, is a violent, abusive drug
addict, who doesn't think twice about killing people for profit.
The theme of the book is loyalty
and Luck. The two things anyone needs to survive the harsh life on Bright Sands
Beach are loyalty and luck. There's big luck and small luck - big luck would be
being born into a rich family so that you would never have to work on crew,
while small luck would be finding a Lucky Strike, a prize valuable enough to
change your life so you never have to work crew again - but the Fates are
always willing to dole luck out. Many of the people who seek luck on the island
give gifts to the Fates in the hopes that their luck will change, but it is
unknown why the Fates choose one individual over another to make lucky. Once
the Fates decide to change one's luck, they have to use that change wisely.
"If you're just smart or just lucky, it's not worth a copper yard. You got
to have both, or you're just like Sloth down at those bonfires, begging for
someone to find a use for you" (Page 51). Nailer's first experience with
luck is when he falls into the oil pocket on the abandoned tanker. He knows
that in this situation, he has to be both lucky and smart if he wants to live.
He chooses not to steal the oil and the Fates reward him with his life. Later,
the Fates throw luck on his shoulder again by presenting the wrecked clipper
ship. Once again, Nailer chooses not to rush for the easy reward. He chooses to
let Nita live rather than cash in at her expense. Although it seems that
Nailer's luck has run out, the Fates continue to reward him for his loyalty and
love. Eventually, he is lucky enough to return Nita to her family and secure a
job for himself in the Patel fleet. There are others who have cashed in on
their Lucky Strikes - like the man who bears the same name, Lucky Strike - but
their luck is finite. Although Lucky Strike is extremely wealthy, he is still
confined to life on the beach, with all its depravity and ugliness. Nailer's
dreams are bigger than that, and although the money from the oil pocket and the
clipper wreckage would have changed his life, money is never what Nailer truly
craves. In the end, the Fates reward Nailer by making him truly lucky and
giving him his one true dream -- freedom.
