Scott Spenser has been overmatched by his subject in this long, convoluted, unrealistic, unrewarding tale of interracial love and sex and death. A Ship Made of Paper is full of straw men and women, contrived and manipulative situations that arise out of the need of the writer to advance the plot rather than out of the needs of the characters to achieve some objective or another, this is nothing anyone should bother with despite the author’s credentials as a best selling writer with a film or two in his resume.