Book talk: Ship Breaker (Virginia Readers' Choice, 2012-2013)

 

Nailer Lopez is a teen with a full-time, grueling, and potentially lethal job, a job which requires him to have facial tattoos which mark him as part of a work crew and also requires him to be fairly small and lightweight. What is he? He’s a ship breaker: he scavenges wrecked, beached ships for their metal. Nailer has to crawl through tight, mazelike ducts inside the ship, usually in utter darkness, and cut away copper wire, aluminum, nickel, and steel clips. It’s really, really scary inside those dark, airless, dead ships and tankers. Kids have gotten lost and trapped and died inside of them. You crawl through tunnels over dead rats’ bodies. You pray to the Scavenge God that you’ll get out alive, and that you’ll scavenge enough metal to stay on your work crew. In this world you’re loyal only to your closest friends. So what would Nailer do if he found a girl, barely alive yet clearly very rich, on a beached ship containing both wealth and dead bodies?

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. Little, Brown: 2010. 326 p. Virginia Reader’s Choice for high school: 2012-2013.

Ship Breaker

Booktalk: All the Lovely Bad Ones [Virginia Readers' Choice]

If you’re a 13-year-old boy with a love of playing pranks on people, and you are visiting your grandmother’s old house for the summer, it’s fairly normal to think about freaking other people out by imitating ghostly noises in the night. Travis and his sister Corey love pranks: they’re natural pranksters. Their grandmother’s old house is actually an inn which takes guests, including some guests who are ghost-hunters. So obviously, we have a no-brainer here. Travis and Corey strategize: Corey will wear a white nightgown, ghostly makeup and walk around a grove of trees; the ghostly noises they make will spook the inn’s guests. It works beautifully. To keep up the illusion, Corey and Travis need to keep doing their nightly ghost pranks. But when Travis returns to the grove, he sees a dark shape near him, ducking out of sight. It’s not his sister. Turns out it’s a real ghost, and there are more than one. One of them, Miss Ada, is seriously evil and would love to bring Corey and Travis down with her. Sadly, Corey and Travis woke these ghosts from their slumber. Now who's been pranked? All the Lovely Bad Ones: A Ghost Story by Mary Downing Hahn.

All the Lovely Bad Ones: A Ghost Story by Mary Downing Hahn. 182 p. 2008: Clarion. Virginia Readers’ Choice for 2011-2012. Because this has some frightening/tragic content, I personally would booktalk it starting at 6^th and 7th grade and not younger.