Book Review: Words on Bathroom Walls by Julia Walton
With deep, emotional storytelling, I’m so excited to review Words on Bathroom Walls today and tell you all the things I loved about this book! If you’ve already read it, I definitely recommend going watch the movie on Amazon.
Book Information
After suffering from schizophrenia for most of his life, Adam is no stranger to what it feels like to be crazy. Adam’s story is told through the perspective of his therapy journal. In refusing to speak out loud to his therapist, Adam recounts his experiences in his journal as he starts a new high school, and the new miracle drug of his dreams, ToZaPrex. In his new high school, Adam meets Maya, Dwight, and the sometimes-insufferable Ian. No one knows about his schizophrenia at his new school, but it soon becomes clear that he won’t be able to hide it forever.
Review | Heidi Dischler
I think what I loved most about Words on Bathroom Walls was the characters. I found them to be so well-grounded and extremely relatable. Julia Walton did an amazing job shaping Adam’s character as well as the personalities of other supporting characters. I often laughed out loud at Adam’s unique humor and felt that I was back in high school with my husband (then boyfriend, of course) listening to his boyish conversations with his friends. I admire Julia Walton the most for that, I think, because it is so hard sometimes as a female writer to write from the male perspective. Boy did she hit it on the nail, though.
As for the story, I appreciated the way it was structured. Call me a nerd but I absolutely love the fact that Walton had her novel set up in the three-act structure simply by the dosages listed by Adam’s therapist. To me, that was ingenious and something that was so creative as a writer. In the beginning, Adam has just started out on the drug ToZaPrex and the dosages are listed at the beginning of each chapter. When things start going downhill (and in a technical aspect, towards the climax of the novel), so is Adam’s dosage as he’s slowly weaned off of the drug. For act three, there are no dosage notes at all. Hidden technical aspects of a novel like this give me life. I’m not kidding. I love love love this and you can totally call me out for the huge book nerd that I am.
I hardly know anything about schizophrenia, so I can’t give a perspective on how it truly relates to the illness. From my point of view, though, I could totally feel how frustrating it was for Adam to deal with his voices and the people who often showed up in his life who weren’t real. What really stuck with me, though, was Julia Walton’s way of never discounting Adam’s view of reality. He may have been the only one who was able to see the hallucinations, but the fact still remained that they were real to him. I absolutely loved how Walton used Adam’s therapist to remind him of this fact.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who really loves YA books in general, especially YA books about mental health. Julia Walton did a perfect job of encompassing everything that a YA book needs: a challenging subject, a little bit of romance, and a lot of personal growth. It’s definitely a story that will stay with me, and it always helps when there’s a cute movie to watch after you finish the book!
Source: Audiobook from Audible
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