CBR13Bingo – Machinery
A book that took me a few false starts to get into. For one, this book is bleak. It’s version of the world involves young children and adolescents eschewing childhood into a life of pure survival. If you’re old enough you can work light crew, finding the wiring, odds and ends, and other manageable salvage from old ships on the Gulf coast. Once you’re old enough, you can move on to heavy crew. Nailer is still on light crew when he falls into a vat of oil in an old ship. Instead of being the giant break this could be, he gets stuck. Another crew member chooses to leave him to die and hopefully return to the bounty. But Nailer survives, his crewmate is exiled, and he returns home to town to the ire of his addict, violent, abusive father. When a “town killer” hurricane rolls through, taking many lives with it and almost his father’s, Nailer goes back out to the beach and finds a luxury yacht with many many treasures (a life changing amount) and a dead crew. A dying girl is also in the yacht, lavished with jewels. In choosing to save her life, he gives up on dreams of escape, and instead gets embroiled in a rescue mission.
This book is bleak for two reasons: 1) it’s bleak and it’s world is bleak; 2) you start to realize that this book isn’t straight up post-apocalypse, but that it’s mid-apocalypse, that that apocalypse is sloooooooowwww, and that it’s ours. Shoot.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7095831-ship-breaker)