This was...something. Something disturbing, something hilarious at times, something that inspired sympathetic longing, and something that frankly hurt to read. This is Caden's seafaring voyage through the treatment of his mental illness, and Shusterman is brilliant at weaving the real and the almost real and the hopefully not real here. Challenger Deep is the deepest trench in the ocean, and in Caden's delusions, he is the first mate on a pirate ship heading straight for it to collect sunken treasure. The captain of the ship is changeable and dangerous, his talking parrot cryptic, and each plots against the other with Caden's help. Caden's fellow hospital dwellers come along through parts of his voyage as different members of the ship's crew, but in the end, it's just Caden and the sea and whatever's at the bottom of it.
What made this such a painful read was the artful way Shusterman wove the real and almost real together, based on his own son's experience with schizoaffective disorder. Drawings from his son's time in the hospital moonlight on pages throughout the book, illustrating Caden's descent, and the tangible evidence of those drawings promotes a visceral realness to this not-quite-fictional account. Caden's resignation (and the author's implied resignation) about the difficulty of living with ongoing mental illness make it a bittersweet journey; you're going to want a happy ending, but even if Caden finds his equilibrium back on the high seas, you know he's going back again eventually. It'd be easy to close the book with a riding off into the sunset victorious moment to satisfy our want for definitive, permanent wins, but what you'll get here is much more honest.
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