Book Review: Ship Breaker

TITLE: Ship Breaker
Book 1 in a series
AUTHOR: Paolo Bacigalupi
PUBLISHED: 2010
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Dystopian, adventure
PREMISE: A boy who strips ships for parts finds a girl on a abandoned ship and has to make a decision about whether to help her in a harsh world.
MY REVIEW: Ship Breaker is one of those books that I wanted to love more then I did. For sure, this is wonderfully written. It's diverse, the imagination is fabulous, and there's constant adventure. I honestly can't rec this enough for boys.
I just didn't connect with it very much. Part of it is being adventure focused, the characters don't get developed much. There's so much happening that I think the author forgot to make us care. I just didn't get stuff or where these characters were coming from. I also wish the world had been developed a bit more. I mean I love setting of it....but there's no real explanation for how it developed and why it is as harsh as it is. Also, while I have no problems with violence (I read Game of Thrones for crying out loud) even I sort of felt like some of the violence here was rather over the top. I felt the author tried too hard in that aspect of it.
But I think most of my disconnect was just me. I'm pretty sure I'm not the target audience for this book. I definitely give the author several points though because again, this was wonderfully written and while I didn't get the world, it was imaginative. I'm hoping the next book develops characters more though.
WHO SHOULD READ: boys, fans of the Knife of Never Letting Go, Hunger Games fans, fans that don't mind violence
MY RATING: Four out of Five oil tankers