Words on Bathroom Walls

by Julia Walton

Now a Major Motion Picture starring Charlie Plummer, AnnaSophia Robb, and Taylor Russell!

Fans of More Happy Than Not and The Perks of Being a Wallflower will cheer for Adam in this uplifting and surprisingly funny story of a boy living with schizophrenia.

When you can't trust your mind, trust your heart.

Adam is a pretty regular teen, except he's navigating high school life while living with paranoid schizophrenia. His hallucinations include a cast of characters that range from the good (beautiful Rebecca) to the bad (angry Mob Boss) to the just plain weird (polite naked guy).
An experimental drug promises to help him hide his illness from the world. When Adam meets Maya, a fiercely intelligent girl, he desperately wants to be the normal, great guy that she thinks he is. But as the miracle drug begins to fail, how long can he keep this secret from the girl of his dreams?

"Echoing the premise and structure of Flowers for Algernon, this [is a] frank and inspiring novel." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

Don't miss Just Our Luck, another stunning book by Julia Walton. Coming in 2020!

• ISBN10: 0399550887
• ISBN13: 9780399550881
• Publish Date: 4 July 2017
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 5 March 2024
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Random House Books for Young Readers
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 304
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780399550881

Reviews

[Sam@WLABB]

Rating: 4.5 Stars

I cried my mascara off there towards the end. They were happy-sad-mad tears. I loved Adam. His voice was so clear. He made me laugh and he made my heart ache. And I loved that Walton put someone like Maya in his life. When you find people like that, you hold on with both hands. I feel like schizophrenia is like a lot of conditions that are poorly represented in movies and TV - misunderstood, and I am glad Walton shed some light on this illness. There are going to be quite a few characters in this book who disappointed me. I actually wanted to throat punch a few, but there were others who were wonderful and some, who even surprised me.

Overall: An emotional and eye-opening look at schizophrenia, which left made my heart ache, break, and fill with warmth.

[Jo]

Originally posted on Once Upon a Bookcase.

Words on Bathroom Walls by Julia Walton sounded like such a great book, but I found I was disappointed.

Adam refuses to talk to his therapist, as he doesn't think therapy will help - it's not going to cure him, not going to make him better, so why bother? So instead, his therapist gets him to write instead; he asks him questions during therapy sessions, and Adam answers them and tells him what's happening in his life later, on a notepad. And that is how the story is told, by Adam writing to his therapist. I've read books previously where the whole book was the main character writing to someone, but Words on Bathroom Walls is more realistic in that Adam doesn't write as if the things are happening as he writes them. Which means there is very, very little dialogue, and mostly just stream of consciousness on Adam's part. And I just really didn't like it.

Everything we read is told to us by Adam, we don't actually see any of it. So we don't see relationships develop, we don't really get to know the other characters, we're just told about them, told about the things that happened, and told how Adam is feeling and what he's thinking. And to be honest, not much really happens. He's taking this new medication, which means he now is now able to tell that his visions and the voices he hears aren't really real, which makes it easier to ignore them when they tell him to do things. So, they're just there, while he goes about his normal teenage life where nothing all that interesting happens. He meets a girl, a relationship starts. He makes a friend. He's bullied. But, again, we're all told about it rather than getting to see it. There's a detachment. And I didn't like it, I found it really difficult to connect with the story.

And the story was also really predictable. As we're told in the blurb, the drug works for a while, until it doesn't, and then things start to go wrong. And you can tell what will happen, and you know where things will go after the events. It was just so predictable. That, along with storytelling that isn't to my taste, I just didn't really enjoy the book.

I must say that I think Adam's Schizophrenia was dealt with well - being said who has no experience of Schizophrenia. I just felt like I understood Adam and how he was feeling. What it was like to see and hear things nobody else could see or hear. It was emotional, especially when the class is talking about a Schizophrenic guy who went into a school and shot teachers and kids, and someone shouts out 'Why didn't he just kill himself?' At those times, it was just heartbreaking to read Adam really seeing what people think of people like him, and he can do nothing about it, because he doesn't want anyone to know, but still it hurts, and makes him angry. No-one knows what it's like to be him, and no-one knows what it's like to lose control.

But overall, this book just wasn't for me. I much preferred Made You Up by Francesca Zappia, thought that is about a girl with Paranoid Schizophrenia, so it's slightly different. This wasn't the right fit for me, but it might be for you, so do read a few other reviews before deciding whether or not you want to read Words on Bathroom Walls.

Thank you to Random House Books for Young Readers via NetGalley for the eProof.

[Leah]

Words on Bathroom Walls is one of those books I want to do justice to in my review; I want to do justice to all of my reviews, let’s be honest, but I feel like it’s especially important with mental health books to make sure you review them correctly, which is something I struggle with really hard because I’m lucky to never have really suffered with my mental health and don’t always understand what people are going through. Yes, you can read about someone like Adam, who suffers from schizophrenia or Norah in Under Rose-Tainted Skies who has agoraphobia but I feel like it’s hard to really, truly understand it unless you have personal experience (not that I would want to suffer either of their experiences).

"That's what you want me to say, isn't it? That I'm emotionally scarred because my dad didn't want to stick around to be my dad? Or that I blame my disease on him? That would be easy."

Words on Bathroom Walls is one of those books that tells, not shows. Adam tells us everything about his life, in the form of a diary, written to his counsellor. He’s starting a new drug trial in the hope of reducing/managing the hallucinations he sees and the voices he hears, having been diagnosed with schizophrenia and, on top of all of that, he also has to start at a new school, in the hopes no one finds out about him. I knew what the book was about going into it, but I have no idea where the title came from. Perhaps I took it way too literally, in expecting there to be words on bathroom walls, but it was lacking in that department. Yes, there was one particular phrase but it must have just been a fitting title, however the meaning of it does escape me.

"I get that I'm not supposed to say that. Everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle, right? But what if they're not? What if the biggest thing they have to worry about is homework and whether they get into a good college? Even if they've lost a family member or their parents are getting a divorce or they're missing someone far away. That is not worse than having to take medication to be in control of your own mind. It's just not."

I really liked Adam’s voice. He’s refreshingly honest about his condition, and it was incredibly interesting to see the different hallucinations he suffers with. Whether it’s the helpful, naked man who coaches him in social situations, or the mob boss who lets rip with a gun whenever he feels like it, or the girl, Rebecca, who’s Adam’s constant companion. Adam’s voice is very sarcastic, very real, very honest. He says himself that he’s hardly a reliable narrator, but I believed him well enough. It was interesting to see how the medication affected him, how it helped him stay grounded in reality, how he could tell the difference between a real person and the tricks his mind was playing on him and to manage all of that, at 16, while navigating a new school and new friends - Dwight and Maya who I loved and wished we’d heard more from, especially Dwight was pretty impressive.

"It's a very strange reality when you can't trust yourself. There's no foundation for anything. The faith I might have had in normal things like gravity or logic or love is gone because my mind might not be reading them correctly. You can't possibly know what it means to doubt everything. To walk into a room full of people and pretend that it's empty because you're not actually sure if it is or not."

There’s a lot of stigma surrounding mental health, the people that will deride others for suffering because it’s not something tangible, that they can see or touch or understand, like cancer. I feel like schizophrenia is one of the worst stigmatised because people automatically jump from being schizophrenic to being a serial killer, as if the two are linked, when really I bet a lot of people are able to manage their schizophrenia and don’t have the tendency to go out and commit mass murder. Words on Bathroom Walls was an incredible read. I hope this lifts the lid a little bit on what it’s like to deal with schizophrenia and while I can’t tell you if it’s brilliant mental health rep, because I have no ties to any of the issues in the book, it seems like it is. I’m happy to correct myself if I’m wrong, but I liked this book. It was an important read, and I loved Adam. Voices, hallucinations, and all.