Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman

genre: contemporary young adult fiction

Caden Bosch is living two parallel lives - the one where he’s a wicked smart high school student and the one where he’s a swabbie on a ship aiming for the Marianas Trench. When the lines start to blur, though, when the fears can’t be cast aside, when the ships starts to feel more real than real life - that’s when Caden’s life starts to spiral. Spiral up or spiral down, it’s hard for him to tell. All he knows is that it all depends on him, somehow - and that’s the biggest problem.

This book. This book gets me in my mama-gut - because while we are always in Caden’s Head, as a parent myself I can’t help but to put myself in the shoes of his parents and the journey they are taking while Caden has his. This from-the-trenches story of mental illness both fascinated and saddened me - I wanted to hug Caden and just SOLVE it somehow but I know, from my own experience, that mental illness will never just be “solved.” It must be endured and traversed and slogged through and that the bumps along the way are as much a part of the solution as the rest of it.

It’s sensitive. It’s honest and quirky and clever and painful. Sometimes ship-land got too long and too abstract for me, which was probably the point, but other than that I really appreciated this book.


I recommend it.