Ship Breaker is set in the same oil-depleted, global-warming-flooded world as The Windup Girl. But where The Windup Girl is pretty adult, both in terms of the complexity of the plot and some of the subject matter (sex, I'm talking about sex), Ship Breaker is a young adult novel with a more straighforward plot. Though, if anything, SB is even more gritty than TWG. Teenage Nailer is not an orphan, but he might as well be, living with his crew scavenging scrap materials from the now-useless giant ships left over from our era. And then there's a big storm. And then... adventures. But gritty and grimy adventures.

FuzzyCo grade: A