Challenger Deep, by Neal Shusterman is a book that uses many extended metaphors to travel through the mind of a teen boy named Caden, as he struggles to understand what is real, and what is in his head.
Challenger Deep is about a boy named Caden that is put in a mental hospital. The story is told from two vantage points, one is this world, and the other is the world Caden spends some of his time in. Caden’s world is on a pirate ship with the Captan, and the parrot as the two main entity’s. In the mental hospital there are people who, as the book unfolds, become eerily similar to those on the ship. The times Caden meets people in the mental hospital is misaligned to when he meets them on the pirate ship, making the pirate ship become more real as the pieces fall into place throughout the book.
Challenger Deep is brilliantly laid out, at the beginning Caden is not in the mental hospital, but you still get pieces of the pirate ship, although it is unclear the actual time the two worlds line up. The way Shusterman slowly reveals the connections in the worlds is absolutely brilliant. There are also many extended metaphors that seem random until the end of the section, then they are often used later in the book as short hand. It’s like an inside joke between you and the book, although many of them aren’t funny. The metaphors are extremely affective and they add another level of enjoyment to reading this book. I now live for secret metaphors.
If you like books that pose difficult questions you should read this book. At first glance Challenger Deep could be viewed as fiction, but upon further inspection you realize this book is all too real. If you are someone who has no respect for realities other than your own you need your bubble burst. In other words, read Challenger Deep.