When done right, I love young adult novels. I love The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Paper Towns. However, I love Words on Bathroom walls even more. The novel is about a boy named Adam with schizophrenia on a new medication who moves to a new catholic school and meets and falls in love with a girl named Maya. The novel is written in epistolary form. It is told through Adam’s journal entries to his therapist. I love how Walton humanizes schizophrenia by crafting a relatable, vulnerable protagonist. In movies, schizophrenia is often misdefined as having multiple personalities when that is actually Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Words on Bathroom Walls may be categorized as young adult romance fiction. This is not to say that Walton makes schizophrenia look “cute.” This is a major criticism of the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. Throughout the novel, Adam narrates about the advantages and limitations of his medication. The most emotional part of the novel for me was when Adam mentions how kids with cancer receive more sympathy than individuals with schizophrenia when schizophrenics are equally humans with emotions just like cancer patients. Through this, Walton highlights Adam’s need for social acceptance. Nevertheless, the novel has a lot of dark humor. Adam’s narrative voice is similar to that of Holden Caulfield’s in The Catcher in the Rye. Adam’s hallucinations are quite humorous. They are not just goofy fantasies. His mobster hallucinations, for example, actually have character. They are not just in the novel simply to be hallucinatory props. As far as gender depictions, Walton is brave enough to have her male protagonist cry. Additionally, Adam has a talent for baking cookies, a talent typically seen with female characters. I also like how Maya had glasses which Adam thought were attractive. This breaks the stereotype in teen books and movies that girls who wear glasses are ugly. Overall, I hope more people read this novel. Not only does it have the potential to raise awareness and empathy about mental illness, but also it is a great novel teens diagnosed with mental disorders can relate to on a personal level.
