Word on Bathroom Walls

Reviewed by: Brooke Faulkner - McArthur Library, Biddeford, Southern Maine Library District

Review Date: December 12, 2017

Review

An irreverent, poignant and funny novel about 16-year-old Adam, who struggles to keep his newly diagnosed schizophrenia a secret at the private Catholic school he's begun attending after friends who learned of his illness responded with rejection and fear.

In addition to taking an experimental (but fictional) medication that helps him to distinguish his hallucinations from reality, Adam also meets regularly with a therapist, but refuses to speak during the sessions. Instead, he writes in journal format to answer weekly questions and each chapter is told in this epistolary format, with the current adjustment in the dosage of his medication noted at the top. Witty and insightful observations about his peers, the school, faith, religion and his family abound.

Adam vividly describes his hallucinations, which often take the form of people who speak to and interact directly with him, making his efforts to conceal them all the more difficult. He's most concerned that fellow student Maya will notice something amiss, as they quickly fall for one another, meet each other's families and grow closer and closer, becoming one another's first love and sexual experience (which in a particularly funny and sacrilegious turn, takes place in a storage room at school while Adam is still partially costumed as Jesus from a Christmas play). Adam's feelings, including his sweetly real adoration for Maya, his persistent guilt for worrying his supportive mom and step-father and understandable frustration with the psychiatric and medical professionals handling his treatment render him an enormously sympathetic narrator.

Readers will come away with a better understanding of his experience and the incredible stress that the stigmatizing of mental illness puts on the many who have it.

Overall Book Score: very good