Challenger Deep: A Heartfelt Exploration of Teenage Mental Health

I had to wait a while after reading this book to form a coherent thought. Such a major book hangover. Just. Wow. I've read a lot of books this year, even some over serious issues, but this is without a doubt the most important. Caden Bosch was just a regular guy until he wasn't. Suddenly he was living two lives - two lives that sometimes bled into one another until they were indistinguishable. One was the life he'd been living since the day he was born, but the other was aboard the Challenger Deep with a crew of highly unusual characters on a journey where he is the designated artist. In his "normal" life, Caden is starting to fall apart. He's paranoid, he always has to keep moving, and people are starting to notice. I will say, at this point, the book can be incredibly difficult to read. It's confusing that he jumps from one life to the other with such fluidity, but you will come to learn that you are genuinely experiencing this right along with him. I got frustrated. It made me read more slowly than I'm used to. I kept going back and rereading parts, sure that I must have missed something. But I urge you, when you inevitably reach this point, to stick with it because all will be revealed in due time. SPOILER AHEAD! . . . . Caden is actually schizophrenic, and his life aboard the Challenger Deep actually parallels his time spent in a mental health center. When I finally realized this and got to comparing characters, the book made perfect sense! . . . . . SPOILER FINISHED! The topics this book ultimately covers are so important, and I've never been exposed to them in such a way that I actually could relate to the characters feelings. You become Caden, you feel his frustration, confusion, paranoia - everything. This is a must-read! ***Teacher side note: I'm a high school teacher, and there are many chapters in this book that you can pull out and use as mini lessons or for a quick write. A couple of particulars I used are Chapter 58: Headbanger that talks about bullying and Chapter 122: Historically Freaking that talks about the perception of mental illness throughout history. Highly recommend it!

This is not the first Neal Shusterman novel I have read, nor is the first one I've read recently. Lately I've been on a Shusterman binge, and read "Dry" and "Bruiser" (which I purchased after reading the "Unwind" series) and decided to pick up "Challenger Deep" as well. When I first opened it up, I'll admit I was disappointed. I didn't like the idea of going on a journey to challenger deep with the main character. But this is a SHUSTERMAN book. I knew I had to be wrong. So I gave it some time and before I knew it, the story swallowed me up. It actually became a guessing game as the story unwound because I hadn't read the summary or any reviews, so I actually had no idea where the story was headed. But as it became clear what was happening to Caden, the story, as any good Shusterman novel does, started to fall into place. More importantly, it proved itself to be the kind of novel that lingers. Not because it was catchy, but because it clearly meant something to the author, and it means something to the people who face the very real difficulties that Caden faces.

I'm constantly looking for fiction including schizophrenic characters that doesn't just write us as murderers, or unhinged, or scary. While looking for a way to spend the rest of my Amazon gift card balance, I found this book. I didn't see any reviews by actual schizophrenic people, but most readers were saying that it was an empathetic portrayal, which I took as a good sign. I took the dive. Minor spoiler warnings ahead. And they were right. It’s the most empathetic, humanizing story about a schizophrenic character I have EVER read and I was shocked with how nuanced and accurate it was. It wasn’t just “oh seeing things that aren’t there… ohhh, scary,” but it was the whole picture. The thought disorder, the speech disorder, the visceral feeling of psychosis. The author based it on his schizophrenic son, and it’s very clear to me that he was studious and sensitive with getting his input. I had some nitpicks with how the author wrote the MC’s medications to be necessary to recovery–even though he adequately brought to light how awful it can feel taking meds, it seemed they were still one of the primary separators in the book between being "well" and being "not well". Meds legitimately aren’t as good as they could be in real life, and aren’t the best solution for everyone, and I was frustrated that wasn’t called out more, but I'm willing to forgive that because of just how human everything else about this book was. Something I really appreciated was the author made a point of showing that recovery isn’t just a one-way street from “not functioning” to “functioning”, but it's a state of being that goes through cycles; remission and relapse. As the MC works through his psychotic break it's emphasized that he's not cured, and he might come back to this point again in the future, but it’ll be okay because he can work through it again. Very predictably, the story goes the route of having the MC hospitalized, but the book allowed him to be angry with the psych ward and have his grievances about it legitimized, and I really enjoyed that. People tend to dismiss complaints about wards but they are legitimately exploitative and can be downright horrifying, and I was grateful it wasn't a perfect haven in the book. As most non mentally ill-written accounts of psych wards are, I just wish it would’ve gone a little further, but it wasn’t outright frustrating. He also makes friends with other kids in the ward and his friendships are legitimately helpful to his recovery, which is also really really important. It wasn’t just like “the healthy people know what's best for you and will rid you of this”, but the other mentally ill kids were integral to him gaining a better understanding of himself. Psychotic people don’t just need to be “cured”; they need to be understood, and they need to have their experiences validated. The kids related to each other in their own psychotic ways and that was everything. The way I think as a schizophrenic person can be so alienating and so lonely among non-psychotic people because they don’t understand and usually don’t try to, and I was so happy that the MC was given a chance to find comraderie from people in a similar boat. In particular, the MC deals with delusions of granduer and reference where he feels he can see all of these signs and patterns, like they’re great truths about the world, but he can’t articulate them and people don’t understand, and he has to get it out of his head because the weight of it is consuming him even though he doesn’t really know what it is and I just relate to that feeling so, so much. But when he gets to the ward, he talks to the other kids and finds that they understand the feeling, and they talk about it, and it was just so important to me in particular that the author gave them room to do that. Here is my biggest criticism: I have a huge issue with how a particular kid in the ward was written. One of the kids is a survivor of pretty significant trauma, and during group sessions she’s notorious for relating the conversation back to her trauma and describing it in detail over and over again, and the other kids see this as annoying. Later in the book the mc crudely tells her to get over it, and the group mediator actually praises him for this after the session. This is infuriating because 1) it paints a trauma survivor as selfish and melodramatic, which is something we endure from society already, 2) it assumes that trauma survivors, a KID no less, is likely to freely talk about their experiences to get attention or to be self-destructive, which is just not the reality–real life trauma survivors are forced to be silent and so we internalize our pain and are acutely self-conscious of being overdramatic or attention-seeking, and 3) it assumes that yelling at a kid with PTSD is gonna make them get over it. This didn’t take up much of the book so I’m only a bit mad about it, but it was pretty upsetting to read in the moment and I’m disappointed that an otherwise humanizing story about schizophrenia would demonize a trauma survivor so readily. I also felt annoyed with how the parents were always visibly uncomfortable and upset around their son during his break, which is a common trope where parents of psychotic kids “grieve” for their kids pre-break and make their child’s suffering all about them. They only seem to connect with him as a person when he’s not actively psychotic. But, really. All-in-all it was accurate, it was sensible, the structure of the chapters and the writing was easy for me to digest, and it was the only “schizophrenic kid has a Beautiful Mind-style psychotic break and goes to a ward” type of plot i’ve ever seen written well, ever. TL;DR: if you need a decent story about a schizophrenic to heal from all the awful stuff the media usually writes about us, I really recommend it. It’s not 100% perfect, and I really wish there was more fiction about schizophrenic people not necessarily about us being in hospitals and going crazy, just us existing as much as non-schizophrenics; but this is still a much, much-needed step away from the insane killer trope, and I really cherished that. I'd give it five stars if it weren't for the weird victim-blaming with the trauma-survivor girl in the ward.

What a helpless feeling it would be to be powerless to stop your child’s descent into a world only they can see. This helps us understand what severe mental illness can be like. The horror and the hope.

I am doing the reading challenge from 2016. One of the prompts was to pick a book with a blue cover, and a book who won the national book award. This is the only reason I bought this book, and man oh man, little did I know it was going to become my favourite book of all time. First of all, I bought the kindle version because it was cheaper, but I regret this. I wish I had bought the paper version to fold the corners of the pages I liked, to underline my favourite passages and so on. I read this book in a matter of hours. At first it was quite difficult to understand, I liked the pace of it (little chapters one after another), but I didn't like how it was always jumping from the Ship to Real Life and so on. And all this boat vocabulary was really hard for me to understand (my mother tongue is French). To be honest, I liked the Real Life chapters more, but at one point, when it all comes together, it made so much sense, I couldn't stop myself for admiring the author. The author made me feel so good, it was just so right, all the pieces of the puzzle coming together. I think that's what I liked most about this book, the parallelism between the 2 stories. Of course, as others have mentioned, the strength of this book is the way the main topic is handled. No romanticisation, no pity either. You can't help but feel this book to your core. I felt like I was suffering from it as much as the main character, I could feel this was way to accurate and detailed to be fiction. And the author's note at the end confirmed my initial intuition. After I finished it, I started reading it again, until I got to the point where the 2 stories come together. This is the kind of book where you just want to do this, to read it again, knowing what's up, with a new eye. I recommended all my friends to read it. This is a masterpiece, and definitely worth your time.

Very nice i will reccomend it

Nice book.

Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman | Illustrated by Brendan Shusterman | "There’s no telling how far down it goes,” the captain says, the left side of his mustache twitching like the tail of a rat. “Fall into that unknowable abyss, and you’ll be counting the days before you reach bottom. " | This book is incredible. Even though I had some problems to initially get into it because it seemed disperse and difficult to follow I kept reading because the story had something that kept me hooked. Once you reach a certain part of the book you'll understand why everything was how it was. While reading the book you'll see how a great plot is being slightly built, you may think you are lost in the book, but then everything will fit into its corresponding place and you won't be able to put the book down until you reach page 308 (which is the last one). I have loved this book so much, not only the plot or the characters, but the way it was written and the way the plot was developed; it is definitely not a common book, but a new and magnificent experience through the thoughts of Caden Bosch, the main character. I can't put into words what this book has done to me, it contains a very strong message about mental illness that needs to be heard. It was simply extraordinary. If you read this book, it won't leave you indifferent.

Das Buch fand ich Klasse. Ich konnte es kaum noch aus den Händen legen, nachdem ich zu lesen begonnen hatte. Für mich war es eine bereichernde Erfahrung, eine Geschichte aus der Perspektive eines Jungen, der an Schizophrenie erkrankt ist, zu lesen. Ohne subjektive Wahrnehmungen mit Schizophrenie gleichsetzen zu wollen, kam mir dennoch beim Lesen öfter die Frage auf, wie wenig von dem, was wir manchmal in bestimmte Situationen hineininterpretieren, auch nur ansatzweise zutrifft. Wahrheit kann so subjektiv sein - und sie bildet individuelle Realitäten.