Fuzaila's Reviews > Challenger Deep

No combination of twenty-six letters can express what this book did to me.

I’ve never been diagnosed with any kind of mental illness. I’ve had bad days - days when I felt like I was the only living being in the planet and everyone else was plotting against me. I’ve had suicidal thoughts for three days at a stretch. I secretly used to think that I might have survived depression once. Those thoughts feel laughable now. I thought I knew mental illness. I could usually connect with mentally ill characters in books and I used to think I knew what it felt like. APPARENTLY NOT.

This book just changed my life.

Shusterman’s story is brilliantly crafted, original, and well researched and the artworks are real . It is an exemplar for mental illness books. He has captured so well what it is like to be mentally ill, drawing from his own experiences as well as his son's, who had been schizophrenic.

“I push through the granite, the sludge, the bones, the dirt, the worms, and the termites, until I’m bursting through into some rice paddy field in China, proving that there’s no such thing as down, because eventually down is up.”

Honestly, why isn’t anyone reading this instead of Scythe? Like, this is IMPORTANT. This is EXTRAORDINARY. This is a MUST READ.

“It’s not like I can control these feelings. It’s not like I mean to think these thoughts. They’re just there, unwanted birthday gifts that you can’t give back.”

Caden Bosch is fifteen. He is schizophrenic and maybe schizoaffective. He is in a ship that sails to nowhere. He also goes to school and has two best friends who have been recently thrown off by his strange behavior. He’s in search of the depth of Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. He can see things others can’t. He knows what people are thinking when they don’t know themselves. He knows truth about this universe no one has yet discovered. He is mentally ill. And this, is his story.

“Do you know how it feels, to be free from yourself and terrified by it? You feel both invincible and targeted, as if the world – as if the universe – doesn’t want you to feel this dizzying enlightenment. And you know there are forces out there that want to crush your spirit like a gas filling all available space. Now the voices are loud, almost as loud as your mother as she calls you down for dinner for the third time. You know it’s the third time even though you don’t remember hearing the first two times. Even though you don’t even remember going up to your room.”

This book did to me what no other book has. I can’t really explain. I had an intense head-ache while reading it. I began to see things that weren’t there. The only time I had hallucinations was this one time when I was fifteen and sick. I’d stayed awake all night staring at the dark ceiling, feeling that the ceiling fan was dropping monsters at me, the room was trying to shrink into me, that I was falling into an abyss I couldn’t escape from. I might have puked a few times that night. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to live like that all the time. I experienced it now. I deeply resonated with Caden Bosch and his thoughts. I had to stop reading at times, scared to continue, thinking that maybe I’m becoming schizophrenic myself. I felt like I was floating an inch from the ground, like I had lost all purpose. I honestly couldn’t sleep well at all. That is how deep and intensely vivid Shusterman’s writing is. It speaks directly to your brain. It consumes you in whole.

That was mostly for the first half of the book. The second half sometimes felt dragged on. I particularly didn’t enjoy the ship scenes much. Mostly because I was confused on what was going on.

But then, it becomes all too clear.

I teared up at times.

I related to Caden.

I became scared.

I worried.

I even thought of DNFing the book just to end turmoil it was putting me through.

But in the end, I just marveled at how deeply and intensely this book affected me.

“And that knowledge is so magnificent you can’t hold it in, and it drives you to share it – but you don’t have the words to describe it, and without the words, without a way to share the feeling, it breaks you, because your mind just isn’t large enough to hold what you’ve tried to fit into it…”

Please people, GO AND READ THIS BOOK. It is going to change your perspective on life, and you’ll never read a mental-illness rep the same way ever again. Not that I wish anyone to go through what I did while reading it, but I want everybody to read this book and have their eyes open.

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I’m deeply grateful to Laura for recommending me this book. I know I wouldn’t have discovered this otherwise. Thanks lovely! xD