Introduction
In the book, Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman, I read about Caden Bosch. Caden is a boy who thinks that he is in a pirate-like world aboard a pirate ship heading for the deepest point in the ocean, The Challenger Deep in The Marianas Trench. The ship is commandeered by an entity known as ‘The Captain’. In reality, though, Caden is spiraling into mental illness as he starts to lose connection with reality.
As the book continued, I realized that the characters from Caden’s mentally constructed world were mirroring the characters appearing in real life. The Captain’s Parrot mirroring Dr. Poirot in real life tries to steer Caden away from The Captain and discourages him from going to the Challenger Deep. The Challenger Deep mirror Caden’s mental illness and visualizes Caden's descent and recovery from mental illness. This book has a lot of things to cover and I can’t possibly cover them in this review, so I would highly recommend reading the book yourself to understand and enjoy the full story.
Opinion
This book visualized mental illness in a way that was easy to understand. The book used characters and events that were different but mirrored the people and events actually happening in Caden’s life. I rate this book a 5 out of 5 because of its excellent storytelling and creativity. I would recommend this book for teens and above. Its complex storyline makes it so that younger children will find it hard to understand. And older people will also have too read it a couple of more times to fully understand the story. In conclusion, this book is an incredibly deep, complex, and creative story that easily allows people to understand the struggles of mental illness through Caden’s made-up adventures at sea.
