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psilosiren 's review for:
Challenger Deep
by Neal Shusterman
This book is amazingly written and profoundly unsettling. Challenger Deep follows the story of Caden Bosch, a young teen who is in the beginning stages of developing mental illness.
At first the book switches between Caden's life with his family and his life on a ship that is headed toward the deepest part of the ocean. As the story progresses, and as Caden's state deteriorates, Caden ends up in an institution. It quickly becomes clear that the characters on the ship were people Caden was interacting with in real life during his institutional stay.
The book pulls us through the experience of being medicated, and through the devastating loss of a friend that causes Caden to stop taking his medication and spiral into the depths again.
The book ends with a heartwrenching author's note that illustrates just how very real this work of fiction is.
Readers are pulled into the mind and experience of someone undergoing mental illness and the treatment to try to control it. I was surprised at how often some of the thoughts seemed somewhat familiar. Quotes of note:
"So what is beneath my feet, really, beyond the lie that it belongs to us? When I concentrate, I can feel what's down there. Beneath the carpet is a concrete slab that rests on earth that was compacted twenty years ago by heavy machinery. Beneath that is lost life that no one will ever find. There could be remnants of civilizations destroyed by wars or by beasts or by immune systems that failed a sudden bacterial pop quiz. I feel the bones and shells of prehistoric creatures. Then I send my thoughts even deeper to the bedrock, where pockets of gas bubble and brew from earth's intestinal distress as it tries to digest its long and often sad history of life. the place where all God's creatures are eventually distilled through the rock into black gunk that we then suck out of the ground and burn in our cards, turning those once living things into greenhouse gases, which I guess is better than spending eternity as sludge. "
"My father is overjoyed. I know he's secretly marking this as a turning point for me. The end of my anxious days. I think he wants it so badly, he doesn't seem to notice that I'm still anxious--but him thinking that I'm okay makes me feel like I am, too. Forget solar energy--if you could harness denial, it would power the world for generations."
"'That poor shell of a woman must forever hold her torch aloft while the world does its business around her,' Calliope says sadly. 'Have you ever considered how lonely it is to be the girl on a pedestal?'"
"The thing is, we never saw him as a person, just as an object of comic relief. Then one day I saw him in the playground. He was playing all by himself. He seemed fairly content, and it occurred to me that his odd behavior had left him friendless. So friendless that he didn't know any better. I had wanted to go over and play with him, but I was scared. I don't know of what. Maybe that his head-banging was contagious. Or his friendlessness. I wish I knew where he was today, so I could tell him I understand how it was. And how easy it is to suddenly find yourself alone in the playground."
"What do I see when I close my eyes? Sometimes there is a darkness there that goes beyond anything I can describe. Sometimes it is glorious, and sometimes it is terrifying, and I rarely known what it's going to be. When it's glorious, I want to live in that place, where the stars are just marking a vast unreachable shell, like they used to believe in days of old. The inside surface of a giant eyelid--and when I peel back the lid, there's a darkness that truly goes on forever--but it's not darkness at all. It's just that our eyes have no way to see that kind of light. If we could, it would blind us, so that eyelid, it protects us. Instead we see stars--the only hint of the light we can never reach. And yet I go there. I push past the stars into that dark light, and you can't imagine how it feels. Velvet and licorice caressing every sense; it melts into a liquid you plunge through; it evaporates into air that you breathe. And you soar! You don't need wings because it supports you of its own accord--of its own will resonating with yours--and you feel not only that you can do anything but that you are anything. Everything. You move through everything, and your heartbeat because a pulse of all things alive, all at once, and the silence between each beat is the stillness of things that exist, but do not live. The stone. The Sand. The rain, and you realize that it is all necessary. The silence must exist for there to be a beat. And you are both those things: the presence and the absence. And that knowledge is so magnificent you can't hold it in, and it drives you to share it--but you don't have 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......but it's not always like that. Sometimes the darkness beyond is not glorious at all, it truly is an absolute absence of light. A clawing, needy tar that pulls you down. You drown but you don't. It turns you to lead so you sink faster in its viscous embrace. It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think you've always felt like this, and there's no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares. And you know the darkness beyond despair, Just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can't have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can't take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation. What do I see when I close my eyes? I see beyond darkness, and it is immeasurably grand both above me and below."
"It's like that old Nike ad. 'Just do it.' My mom likes to tell the story about how she had gained so much weight when Mackenzie was born, and exercise was so daunting, she didn't know where to begin, so she just ate and got fatter. Finally she started telling herself 'Just do it,' and it was the magic mantra to get her exercising regularly again. She dropped the weight before Mackenzie turned two. On the other hand, there was this bizarre cult that committed mass suicide wearing brand-new Nikes as their own warped homage to 'Just do it.' I suppose eve a simple slogan can be twisted into whatever shape we want, like a balloon animal--we can even make it loop back around on itself, becoming a noose. In the end, the measure of who we are can be seen in the shapes of our balloon animals."
"When he touches a wall the ooze grows thicker, drawn to his hand as if he's become a gravity well for the darkness--and it occurs to me that the dark must be in love with the light. Yet one must always kill the other."
At first the book switches between Caden's life with his family and his life on a ship that is headed toward the deepest part of the ocean. As the story progresses, and as Caden's state deteriorates, Caden ends up in an institution. It quickly becomes clear that the characters on the ship were people Caden was interacting with in real life during his institutional stay.
The book pulls us through the experience of being medicated, and through the devastating loss of a friend that causes Caden to stop taking his medication and spiral into the depths again.
The book ends with a heartwrenching author's note that illustrates just how very real this work of fiction is.
Readers are pulled into the mind and experience of someone undergoing mental illness and the treatment to try to control it. I was surprised at how often some of the thoughts seemed somewhat familiar. Quotes of note:
"So what is beneath my feet, really, beyond the lie that it belongs to us? When I concentrate, I can feel what's down there. Beneath the carpet is a concrete slab that rests on earth that was compacted twenty years ago by heavy machinery. Beneath that is lost life that no one will ever find. There could be remnants of civilizations destroyed by wars or by beasts or by immune systems that failed a sudden bacterial pop quiz. I feel the bones and shells of prehistoric creatures. Then I send my thoughts even deeper to the bedrock, where pockets of gas bubble and brew from earth's intestinal distress as it tries to digest its long and often sad history of life. the place where all God's creatures are eventually distilled through the rock into black gunk that we then suck out of the ground and burn in our cards, turning those once living things into greenhouse gases, which I guess is better than spending eternity as sludge. "
"My father is overjoyed. I know he's secretly marking this as a turning point for me. The end of my anxious days. I think he wants it so badly, he doesn't seem to notice that I'm still anxious--but him thinking that I'm okay makes me feel like I am, too. Forget solar energy--if you could harness denial, it would power the world for generations."
"'That poor shell of a woman must forever hold her torch aloft while the world does its business around her,' Calliope says sadly. 'Have you ever considered how lonely it is to be the girl on a pedestal?'"
"The thing is, we never saw him as a person, just as an object of comic relief. Then one day I saw him in the playground. He was playing all by himself. He seemed fairly content, and it occurred to me that his odd behavior had left him friendless. So friendless that he didn't know any better. I had wanted to go over and play with him, but I was scared. I don't know of what. Maybe that his head-banging was contagious. Or his friendlessness. I wish I knew where he was today, so I could tell him I understand how it was. And how easy it is to suddenly find yourself alone in the playground."
"What do I see when I close my eyes? Sometimes there is a darkness there that goes beyond anything I can describe. Sometimes it is glorious, and sometimes it is terrifying, and I rarely known what it's going to be. When it's glorious, I want to live in that place, where the stars are just marking a vast unreachable shell, like they used to believe in days of old. The inside surface of a giant eyelid--and when I peel back the lid, there's a darkness that truly goes on forever--but it's not darkness at all. It's just that our eyes have no way to see that kind of light. If we could, it would blind us, so that eyelid, it protects us. Instead we see stars--the only hint of the light we can never reach. And yet I go there. I push past the stars into that dark light, and you can't imagine how it feels. Velvet and licorice caressing every sense; it melts into a liquid you plunge through; it evaporates into air that you breathe. And you soar! You don't need wings because it supports you of its own accord--of its own will resonating with yours--and you feel not only that you can do anything but that you are anything. Everything. You move through everything, and your heartbeat because a pulse of all things alive, all at once, and the silence between each beat is the stillness of things that exist, but do not live. The stone. The Sand. The rain, and you realize that it is all necessary. The silence must exist for there to be a beat. And you are both those things: the presence and the absence. And that knowledge is so magnificent you can't hold it in, and it drives you to share it--but you don't have 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......but it's not always like that. Sometimes the darkness beyond is not glorious at all, it truly is an absolute absence of light. A clawing, needy tar that pulls you down. You drown but you don't. It turns you to lead so you sink faster in its viscous embrace. It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think you've always felt like this, and there's no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares. And you know the darkness beyond despair, Just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can't have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can't take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation. What do I see when I close my eyes? I see beyond darkness, and it is immeasurably grand both above me and below."
"It's like that old Nike ad. 'Just do it.' My mom likes to tell the story about how she had gained so much weight when Mackenzie was born, and exercise was so daunting, she didn't know where to begin, so she just ate and got fatter. Finally she started telling herself 'Just do it,' and it was the magic mantra to get her exercising regularly again. She dropped the weight before Mackenzie turned two. On the other hand, there was this bizarre cult that committed mass suicide wearing brand-new Nikes as their own warped homage to 'Just do it.' I suppose eve a simple slogan can be twisted into whatever shape we want, like a balloon animal--we can even make it loop back around on itself, becoming a noose. In the end, the measure of who we are can be seen in the shapes of our balloon animals."
"When he touches a wall the ooze grows thicker, drawn to his hand as if he's become a gravity well for the darkness--and it occurs to me that the dark must be in love with the light. Yet one must always kill the other."