4.5
Sometimes a book is just all that much better for being so disgustingly horrible. For not glossing over the gruesome details, for keeping the reader hooked in wide-eyed horror. This is that kind of book. The author doesn't waste his time on niceties, this story's about the harsh realities of survival and the unfortunate lengths that people have to go to in order to just stay alive. This book is nasty and gritty, and yet none of the violence and gore felt gratuitous, and above all else Paolo More...

I was a little saddened after finishing Wind Up Girl and discovering that the Bacigalupi’s next book was going to be a young adult. I find this an annoying trend of authors of complex, adult, and sophisticated speculative literature to chasing YA dollar. Teens have everything these days grumpy old me says, leave me my speculative fiction. So instead of rushing out and getting his next title I decided to wait and see. I got my hands on both Ship Breaker and its sequel/sidepiece Drowned Cities and More...

Actual rating: 4.5 stars.

The physical world is oppressively present in Bacigalupi's fiction, as it is in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novels (Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood): a world changed for the worse by global warming, with island nations wiped out and coastal areas no longer habitable; a world further ruined by human shortsightedness, where genetically engineered plant viruses introduced into the environment by agricultural conglomerates in order to wipe out competitors' crops have m More...

I want to read this because it is the sequal to "Ship Breaker" and I thought that it was a good book

I'm a fan, and I'd bump my star rating more toward three if I could, but this strikes me as Bacigalupi's least successful book by far. There's a tendency toward bigness that pushes the whole thing too much toward allegory, undermining its nuanced examination of why even good people do very bad things in order to survive. When soldiers burn a piece of art in their campfire, for example, it's not just any old painting but, apparently, Christina's World. (Even though it, in our reality at least, li More...

I've had plenty of time to mull over this book and my review, and yet...I still can't quite find words for it. There's just something about this novel, something about the way it just sucks you in, that it's hard to write about. Let's start out, then, with some things about it that are concrete.

The futuristic, dystopian setting is fabulous. It's dark and gritty. It's incredibly believable in a way that is unnerving. As I wrote in my review of Ship Breaker, it "took those mediocre dystopian The G More...

It’s hard to say for certain what I like most about Paolo Bacigalupi’s young adult books. Maybe it is the sense that Paolo Bacigalupi doesn’t write down for his audience and tackles deeper themes with a certain finesse. Or perhaps it is the world building? Or maybe I really like his complex and flawed characters the best? One think I am positive about is that as soon as I saw The Drowned Cities on Audible, I immediately bought it, despite having the Netgalley on my kindle.
Read the rest of my rev More...

A large majority of book-reading teens, young adults, and adults I know are in agreeance that once you’ve read one moody post-apocalyptic story filled with depressing characters and dark plot, you’ve read them all. I mean, let’s be honest here, authors just take the same exact dreary and dull setting, same exact general plot outline, and then fill it in with some different words before publishing, right?


But Huzzah! Have no fear: if you finally want a break from this cynical way of thinking and More...

War is hell - in case you didn't know - even in the future in a dystopian world - especially when it's fought by children who are pawns of the few surviving adults. It took me a bit to find my bearings with this book as I kept expecting to see references to the first book - Shipbreaker - but there are almost none. This story takes place in Washington, D.C. (which I could have figured out by the cover, but that explanation was slow in taking shape in the story)and follows the plight of two childr More...

How did this guy almost win a National Book Award?
Ok, it was the Young People and not the big one, but still. The Drowned Cities (his second novel after the [I hope much better] Ship Breaker) isn't really an awful book and reads sort of well, and I guess it can raise some moral questions on the importance of our decisions and such. But a very few ones, and quite simple too. Its whole nihilistic vibe just seems too grim to be taken seriously, and the abundance of violence and slaughter should pro More...

The Drowned Cities by Bacigalupi Paolo ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

The First book I read this year was the Drowned Cities by Bacigalupi Paolo. I chose this book because I read the summary, and it sounded very interesting. However, I had mix feelings when reading this book.

To start off, I really liked the way the author wrote the book. He started out with one story in the first chapter, and then completely switched over in the second. As I kept reading the book, it made me think about why the author would even More...

This was a great and high anxiety novel that I believe is well worth reading. I simply picked up this book because it looked like an easy-reader, being a YA book, but it had so much more meaning than most YA books. Bacigalupi creates an imitative new world, which actually turns out to not be far from our modern world right now. It is set in a futuristic dystopia in which there are many bans of soldiers killing each other for so long that they don’t even have any recollection for what they were f More...

Before I start singing praises, I should mention that The Drowned Cities is a companion novel to Ship Breaker. I read Ship Breaker two or three years ago, or hundreds of books earlier, so my memories of it are hazy at best. Because of this, I can’t comment on how faithful they are to each other, if one is better written than the other, or any other comparison between the two. What I am willing to say though, is that even without having previous knowledge of the world, I was able to follow along More...

Bacigalupi is now firmly on my small list of if-he-wrote-it-I-will-read-it authors.

This book is labelled Youth or Young Adult, but it's definitely for the more mature young reader. The only thing youth-oriented that I sensed was a bit of inevitability to much of the plot; that is, a tense situation whose resolution will come as no surprise to those who have read a lot of good books. There's nothing wrong with that.

I didn't realize that Ship Breakers precedes this. As far as I can tell, it's no More...

"The Drowned Cities" by Paolo Bacigalupi is a well written, very detailed book.The way he writes makes you feel like you are right there in the scene with whichever character you happen to be reading about at that time.For example, When Mahlia and Tool are in the jungle on their way to the drowned cities and Mahlia is attacked by coywolves,the way it was written I felt like I was sitting there watching the fight happen.I would recommend this book to anyone who like fiction books in general just More...

I just finished The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi, and, holy cow, folks—this story rocked.

It's set in the future in the area around Washington D.C. which is the titular drowned cities. They're drowned because the climate has gotten warmer, the seas have risen, and D.C. is half under water, permananetly flooded. It's more like Georgia or Florida—gators, kudzu, the works. But this is not another dumb book about global warming. If it were, I wouldn't be writing this.

No, the United States has f More...

The Drowned Cities isn’t an easy read – it’s set in a war zone, after all. Life is difficult for everyone, but even more so for the half-breed children of the Chinese peacekeepers who left the Drowned Cities to its bloody dead when the warlords’ chaos got to be to much for them to contain.

As one of the half-breeds, Mahlia is lucky to be alive and even luckier that the kind Dr. Mahfouz has taken her in as his assistant, even though she only has one hand. She lost the other to soldiers, and would’ More...

This book takes place in the same world as Shipbreaker, and one character continues from that book: the man-dog-tiger-hyena creature with a kindly bent. It's describing another part of the country (from the New Orleans of Shipbreaker) where environmental change has devasted the land, waters, social fabric. There's a scrappy girl and a mercenary with a bit of a conscience. It was fine but without the impact and immediacy of Shipbreaker, which descriptions of New Orleans after The Accelerated Age More...

Bacigalupi, P. (2012). The drowned cities. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 437 pp. ISBN: 978-0-316-05624-3. (Hardcover); $17.99.

Continuing the Printz winning story begun with Ship Breaker, readers travel with Mahlia and Mouse into the ravaged regions on the outskirts of the Drowned Cities. When Mahlia and Mouse meet up with Tool (the half man war machine from Shipbreaker), Tool has just barely escaped death from a vicious gator, to say nothing of Colonel Glenn Stern and his men who are dete More...

Bacigalupi's novel makes me want to write in cliches; it's a high octane action flick, a rollercoaster ride full of hairpins and sudden drops. Above all, it's a very competent piece of dystopian YA - clearcut characters (child soldiers, the cast-offs of a society riddled with violence, and Tool the hybrid augment, who has travelled over and provides the link back to Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker), convincingly detailed setting (Washington DC and its environs after climate change has brought the 'Acc More...

The Drowned Cities is a worthy companion to Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker; however, where Ship Breaker is full of hope, The Drowned Cities is a harder, harsher story. The Drowned Cities is a dystopian novel which looks at the ugly side of war. There is no glory here; only revenge, survival, and a threatening world full of violence. The story centers around Mahlia and Mouse, two young refugees who’ve bonded together and taken up with a charitable doctor in a jungle village. They’ve made a life for th More...

I picked up Ship Breaker and Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi because I loved The Windup Girl so much. I had no idea they were young adult fiction until I had plowed through most of the first one so quickly I had to sit back and question why it was going so fast. It was unclear to me if these books were set in the same dystopia as Windup, but they were definitely set in an equally chilling and equally plausible post-environmental disaster world--this one much less ambiguous than HG in its or More...

For my money, Paulo Bacigalupi is one of the few writers of dystopian science fiction right now who's not just channeling the social anomie of the moment, but is gazing out over the ramparts towards the approaching dust cloud. He asks a direct and urgent question that other novelists don't: what would happen if our fossil fuel-driven, environmental havok-wreaking global economy broke down? Would human society have to foresight to adapt, or would it just start to cannibalize itself, reverting to More...

I am a fan of Shipbreaker, so was excited for this one-- which turned out to be totally different, but not in a bad way. Same setting and world, different characters and story line. Equally, if not more so, memorable. This is a book that didn't pull its punches... It didn't gloss over the horrific/realistic details of life in this type of environment. Which-let's face it--is startlingly close to parts of our world today. The whole time I read, I kept thinking back to other books I've read about More...

I was one of many eagerly waiting for the sequel to the outstanding Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. I knew it would be hard to match or top Shipbreaker for excitement, intensity, fascinating characters and moral dilemnas, but I was hopeful. The Drowned Cities comes close to meeting my high expectations. The excitement and intesity are there and the moral dilemnas actually are more prominent in Drowned Cities, but the characters are not as intriguing. Maybe it is just that the characters are mor More...

This thoguth provoking look at another area of Bacigalupi's world as depicted in Ship Breaker is a beautiful, yet mournful look at life in a future dystopian war zone. Ravaged by climate changes and fossil fuel depletion, the Drowned Cities of the Atlantic Coast are ruled by waring factions who employ or conscript willing and unwilling individuals -- most of whom are teenagers and a few of which are monstrous constructs -- into cruel bands of "Soldier Boys." Without mercy or conscience, most of More...

I would give this book 3.5 stars. After reading Bacigalupi's first book, "The Windup Girl", I was ready to anoint him as one of my favorite new authors. His short story collection "Pump Six" was also great. Then he switched to the Young Adult (YA) format that seems to be all the rage these days with "Ship Breaker." While that was a good book, it wasn't as good as his earlier works. "The Drowned Cities", while still marketed as a YA offering and taking place in the same dystopian future America a More...

Okay, I am a fan! I should be reviewing strictly as a library professional, but since reading "Ship Breaker," I have been looking forward to Bacigalupi's next Y.A. novel. "The Drowned Cities" does not disappoint. In "Ship Breaker," Bacigalupi created a dystopian future world set in the former United States. He was not ready to leave this world and has written another story set in its Drowned Cities (formerly known as Washington D.C. and the surrounding area). Fantastic! He gives us a new adolesc More...

Generally speaking, I usually really enjoy companion books that are linked to but not direct sequels of other books.
I know that I'm supposed to love this book, and that I'm supposed to be moved by the fact that the author tackles such a heavy subject as "child soldiers"...I think I'm supposed to be able to react genuinely to the horror because, by setting the story in a dystopian future United States (the Drowned Cities are the DC metro area), we can both relate to and distance ourselves from th More...

I really enjoyed "Ship Breaker", the premise was interesting and the writing good. However, I was not so enamoured by this one, which is not a sequel but more of a parallel. It was just too dark, and too depressing and the characters kept making decisions that would lead them to more pain. And so violent! More characters died in this book than in many adult books I've read, so I would definitely recommend it for the more mature teenage reader. As the plot grew darker and darker, a part of me wan More...