Adam has just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He sees and hears people who aren’t there: Rebecca, a beautiful girl who understands him; the Mob Boss, who harasses him; and Jason, the naked guy who’s unfailingly polite. It should be easy to separate the real from the not real, but Adam can’t.

Still, there’s hope. As Adam starts fresh at a new school, he begins a drug trial that helps him ignore his visions. Suddenly everything seems possible, even love. When he meets Maya, a fiercely intelligent girl, he desperately wants to be the great guy that she thinks he is. But then the miracle drug begins to fail, and Adam will do anything to keep Maya from discovering his secret.

This book! Words on Bathroom Walls surprised me in great ways. I received this arc on netgalley SO long ago and I didn’t pick it up till now because I was worried it wasn’t for me, I don’t know why? I just lost interest in it after a while and just avoided picking it up.

ALAS we are approaching the end of the year and I want to get ALL the books read (a girl can dream), I was meant to just see what a chapter of this was like while I had 15mins to fill and ended up not putting it down!

Told in first point of view as a letter/diary type entry to be given to his therapist, Adam’s voice is strong and gripped me from the beginning. Never losing his unique personality the whole way through Adam is really well written and I would happily read more books with him narrating. I loved being inside his head even with the hard times, and hard times there were.

Adam has Schizophrenia and is part of a test group of people for a new drug, his descriptions of how it felt with out the drug, how scared he is for not only himself and his future but his parents, the rejection from his old school friends, and not wanting to tell his new ones in fear they’ll be scared of him or pity him.

“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. To never feel completely alone even when you are.”

The family relationships are complicated, Adams friendships were awesome to watch unfold, the baking make me super hungry, the love interest isn’t an upbeat girl, she’s moody and not one to put a fake smile on to make others feel better about themselves and I loved her even though we didn’t see to much of her life other than what Adam seen. I really enjoyed it all.

The plot? Figuring yourself out, coming of age, living with a mental illness, letting people in despite wanting to be seen as “normal”, it was just so well done for me and well written.

I’d recommend this to anyone, Adams voice is distinctive and the subject matter important, facing stigmas in mental illness is a thing our society really needs to catch up on.

4.5/5 stars

This book is really underrated so I don’t really expect anyone to have read it but IF by chance you have read it let me know what you thought?! 

 

Thank you netgalley for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review 💙