4/1/2016
"Challenger Deep" by Neal Shusterman
Copyright 2012, 320 pages
Realistic fiction

Image taken from Goodreads

Challenger Deep is one of those few novels that linger in your thoughts long, long after the last page. I love the cover design. It pretty much captures the book as a whole. I love the strewn, jumbled up yarn up top, the blue that grows darker, and Caden - making a lone descent towards the bottom of the Mariana trench. I think it captures the blend between fantasy and reality in Caden's eyes and how detached he felt from the rest of the world. As for the content itself, I like how Shusterman highlighted a lot of issues regarding the mentally ill and how society treats them while still telling Caden's story. There was a discussion about the famous mentally ill people - Vincent van Gogh and Michelangelo, to name a few - that put them under a very different light. Sometimes when people don't act the way society defines "people", we forgot they're still people. This novel would certainly help reminding readers that they still are. I feel like this book showed me a whole new perspective of the world - from the eyes of the mentally ill. Ones that we have, and still do, sweep under the rug.

About Shusterman's writing itself, I can only say that he deserves every last bit of that 2015 National Book Awards medal. The narration really did put us inside Caden's head. Early at the beginning of the book, all we see are life on 'the ship'. All we hear are Caden making very much sense of all the illogical things he did, said or believed. Later when Caden started taking medications, we see pages where the ship and the hospital setting blends into one. For example, there is one part that begins with Caden approaching Carlyle when he was mopping the deck, but then midway through we read that Carlyle "closed his laptop". We also see some sort of a retelling of what happened on the ship in its real life equivalent - showing that Caden has developed an awareness of his real-life surroundings. One thing that I love the most though, is how Shusterman led us to figuring out who is who. It is not until much later in the book that we found out "the captain" has no real life human equivalent. I was very confused - as I probably should be - if Dr. Poirot is the parrot or the captain. At the point where Caden shot the parrot - followed by an interaction at the hospital which prompted Caden to say: "Poirot is dead to me", I realized that the parrot is Dr. Poirot. But who's the captain then?

Honestly even until the very end of the book I'm not entirely sure who - or what - the captain is supposed to represent. Sure, he was a copy of the homeless man Caden met in his holiday in New York, but what is he representing exactly? If we want to say "Caden's mental illness", then what about the Abyssal Serpent? Isn't that what's supposed to represent the schizophrenia? Or is the Serpent schizophrenia, and the captain mental illness as a whole? I don't know if Shusterman meant it to be open-ended like that, or if I just missed an obvious clue. Either ways, this book is a must read. Not only do we see a great author in action, but we also learn something valuable that most of us probably would never learn elsewhere.