“Fall into that unknowable abyss, and you’ll be counting the days before you reach bottom. Read it now.Ĭhallenger 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. I have nothing else to say other than this: Read this book. It's about a topic that should be written and talked about more often. Readers will follow Caden's descent into schizophrenia, and somewhere along the way, his hallucinations will become real to us, too. And then he ends up on a ship, with a crew that he can't trust anymore than he can trust himself.Īlthough both auditory and visual hallucinations are constantly clouding his judgement, there are also moments where the clouds part, and Caden can see things for what and how they really are. The dolphins on his little sister's wallpaper are out to get him. They have been replaced by something sinister. He is sure that his parents are not, in fact, his real parents. He believes that a student at school is trying to kill him.

His once concrete artwork becomes abstract and obscure. As a reader, we witness the growing paranoia and erraticism in Caden's daily thoughts. Challenger Deep is both a journey across oceans and a descent (but more accurately a plummet) into the deepest trenches you can imagine.Ĭaden Bosch is mentally ill. “They all think medicine should be magic, and they become mad at me when it's not.”

Challenger deep by neal shusterman