Ship Breaker - Post Reading

“You toss your luck in the air and it rattles down on the gambling boards and you either live or die.” This quote was important to Ship Breaker as the book regularly talked about luck. I think what this quote means is that, you can do a certain amount of work to get something to happen, but it’s not certain that it will.
To me, it seems like a lot of this book has to do with luck. Perhaps this is because they live in a world where your life depends on how much goods you can pull from a small, dangerous space so that someone else can profit off of it. Everything in their lives depends on how much wire they pull out, if the weather is good, and if they don’t have an accident. In Nailer’s case, his day also depends on what kind of mood his dad is in.
Some people, like Lucky Girl, are born rich, and don’t seem to be affected by luck at all. However, she made it through the storm, when all the others on the clipper were killed. Others, like Lucky Strike, are born poor, but happen to find or do something that makes them rich. For example, Lucky Strike found oil and smuggled it out, becoming rich and using his influence to become richer.
Pima and Sadna say that Nailer is lucky after he escapes alive, and call him “Lucky Boy”. Others say that if he was lucky, then he would have escaped and still kept the oil.

I think that the characters became too consumed with luck and the like and didn’t do anything themselves. I think they went from “I can’t control everything, so I shouldn’t get upset if something doesn’t work out right”, to “If I can’t control everything, then why should I make any plans in advance at all”. In my opinion, we should try to do what we can, but realize that it won’t always work out.