Title: The Drowned Cities
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
Genre: YA dystopian
Review:
I absolutely adored Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker, a novel that is on my top 20 favorite books of all time (speaking of which, I need to make time to reread that book!) I was expecting a good read from The Drowned Cities, nothing spectacular, but still a worthwhile read. Well, I got much more than I bargained for. I loved The Drowned Cities and it has secured a place on my bookshelf. Although this novel is listed as the sequel to Ship Breaker, this book actually works as a stand alone novel as well.
I feel like The Drowned Cities was written with a naturalistic/naturalism theme in mind. Naturalism is basically a movement in which humans are stripped down to their most basic form and nature is depicted as neither good nor evil. The world simply is the world. So basically naturalism deals a lot with survival of the fittest, man vs. nature and all that stuff with no sugar coating. And let me assure you, there was no sugar coating in The Drowned Cities. The author didn't try to beat around the bush with the cruelty featured in this dystopian, futuristic world. The violence and graphic descriptions weren't gratuitous, but they weren't rainbows and ponies either.
