Agent: Andrea Brown, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. With the growing concern of his family, Caden takes too many painkillers, eats too little, and paces around the house in a dissociated state. As Caden says, “There is no such thing as a ‘correct’ diagnosis,” and though his story doesn’t necessarily represent a “typical” experience of mental illness, it turns symptoms into lived reality in ways readers won’t easily forget. As a fifteen-year-old struggling with schizophrenia and anxiety, life is one confusing mess of hallucinations and worried thoughts. It’s a powerful collaboration, and crucial to the novel’s credibility. Shusterman has mined personal experience of mental illness with his son Brendan, whose line drawings mirror Caden’s fragmentation in swirling lines eerily reminiscent of Van Gogh. This book is all about a 15 year old boy navigating the waters of his mental illness. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s heartbreaking. External reality still registers: people around Caden run the gamut of humor, scolding, threats, and avoidance to pressure him into changing behavior he no longer controls. Challenger Deep is a deeply powerful and personal novel from one of today’s most admired writers for teens. The metaphor’s not exactly subtle, but Shusterman finds unexpected resonance in its details-the tarry seams in the wood, the human ballast. His internal narratives are sometimes dreams, sometimes hallucinations, and sometimes undefinable, dominated by a galleon and its captain, sailing with an enormous, sullen crew to the deepest point of the Marianas Trench, Challenger Deep. With lyricism and potent insight, Shusterman ( Unwind) traces the schizophrenic descent and return of Caden Bosch, an intelligent 15-year-old and a gifted artist.
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