![]() ![]() Within a year of graduating, he had his first book deal, and was hired to write a movie script. After spending his junior and senior years of high school at the American School of Mexico City, Neal went on to UC Irvine, where he made his mark on the UCI swim team, and wrote a successful humor column. No other compensation was given and all opinions are my own.***Īward-winning author Neal Shusterman grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he began writing at an early age. ***Disclosure: I received this book from Edelweiss and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This is the type of book that explores the depths of the human psyche and shows us the resilience of the human spirit, demonstrating that, though mental illness can be devastating, hope is never lost. I give Challenger Deep 4.5/5 stars. #CHALLENGER DEEP FULL#For that reason alone, I feel like this book is an astounding and important read!Ĭhallenger Deep can be a difficult, twisted and sometimes disturbing read, but it’s also brilliant – full of depth and emotion. You can’t help but put this book down with a deeper understanding of what someone with this type of mental illness truly feels and sees when they are in its grip. Reading this book will help you understand that perspective more too. The book is strange, but that’s because Shusterman so accurately portrays the POV of a character who’s had a break from reality. (The illustrations are pictures that his son actually drew while he was suffering from his own mental illness.) It was obvious that Shusterman had created this broken and damaged character with a true sense of love and understanding of what a serious mental illness can do to a person. His own son went through much of the same darkness that Caden went through in this book, and the realism of that shined through. As I mentioned in my discussion post Based on a True Story, this book had its basis in Shusterman’s real-life experiences. ![]() An honest portrayal of serious mental illness.And that’s when I went from feeling like this book might just be a little too strange for me to realizing that all of the puzzle pieces were coming together. Each strange character, all of the crazy things that they did and said, they all started to make sense once you hit that fifty percent mark in the book. It all came together. See, I shouldn’t have doubted, because Shusterman is truly brilliant, and every nuance of Caden’s psychedelic alter-reality had a deeper meaning, had a connection to his real life (which we would see, alternating with chapters that took place in Caden’s schizophrenia-induced life).Until I got to about the mid-point of the book … which is when … Did I kind of enjoy reading about this weird alternate reality? Yes, but I didn’t understand it at all. It was weird. And, honestly, I found myself wondering, if this had been any other author besides Neal Shusterman (who I have undying faith in), if I would have stuck it out at all because I just didn’t get the twisted maritime world that Caden lived in – or the strange people around him – or just about anything that was happening. ![]() It kind of reminded me of listening to my dad’s old drug-induced Pink Floyd albums (or maybe the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus”). Reading from Caden’s perspective when he is having a psychotic episode is … well … psychotic. In fact, it bordered on psychedelic in some places. I kept hovering between four and four-and-a-half stars, even though I think it’s brilliant in a lot of ways.
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