Challenger Deep tells the story of high school student Caden Bosch, who has to overcome his raging negative thoughts. This book is a realistic fiction novel written by Neal Shusterman. The protagonist, Caden, always overthinks everything. He thinks people at school want to hurt him, even though he’s never spoken to any of them before. He always thinks about the negatives, and never the positives. Because of this, his parents chose to send him to a mental hospital to help with all these obstructive problems. There, he meets new friends named Callie and Hal, who help him win against his thoughts. But at the hospital, things become worse since the kids there have problems just as bad as Caden, or even worse.

Challenger Deep had some mature topics that some readers might not be comfortable reading about, including self-harm and suicide. Overall, I think the idea of the story was decent, but the way Shusterman wrote it was confusing. It was hard to follow, you would figure out something that happened in an earlier chapter, multiple chapters later. This made it hard to like the plot of the story since it was so hard to follow up on. Shusterman developed the characters well, but it's still hard to like them since the way he wrote the story was too complex. To sum it all up, Challenger Deep was a really difficult book to read. It had some good suspense, but that's about it. The chapters went back and forth from real life, to Caden’s mind in a pirate ship which had a whole separate plot. This made the story even trickier to read. Overall, I don’t recommend this book because of how hard it was to read.