Words on Bathroom Walls by Julia Walton

 

From Goodreads, 

"Soon to be 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?"

Goodreads - Words on Bathroom Walls

Awards and Nominations: 

• Rhode Island Teen Book Award Nominee (2019)

I've recently been drawn to books that have a movie adaptation.  I really enjoy reading the book and then watching the movie and determining which is better.  After a summer stroll through Books-A-Million, I noticed this book with the large print across the top reading "NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE".  I immediately snatched the book up and knew I would find the movie somehow, somewhere.  

Adam is just a normal teenager, except that he has schizophrenia.  He is transferring to a new school and is part of a new drug study to hopefully help relieve him of some of his hallucinations.  Adam struggles to ignore the cast of characters that appear to only him.  Things become even trickier once he starts making friends and meets a girl that he really likes.  Will the drug work and will Adam get away with his secret?

This book was really dry and kind of boring.  I felt like it let me get a glimpse inside the mind of someone who has schizophrenia, but it wasn't very exciting.  I didn't like that the entire book is in a journal format because Adam is supposed to be talking to his therapist, but he refuses to talk.  The therapist decides to have him write in a journal so that there is some form of communication going on between them.  There were conversations in the book, but I felt like all of the characters were flat.  Even Adam with his multiple character hallucinations was boring.  There wasn't a real plot and there was nothing exciting until prom happened.  And even then the book fizzled after the situation at prom.  I was also kind of confused by the title of the book.  I thought that the words on the bathroom walls would be some big and moving piece in the book and it most definitely wasn't.  They were just words on a wall.  

I was able to rent this movie from Redbox.  I watched part of it one evening and was fairly bored by it.  I finished it the next day and tried my hardest not to rage over the movie.  The movie was NOTHING like the book.  Adam was of course the main character and sure he had schizophrenia, but that was about the only thing that was the same.  Adam's hallucinations were different than they were in the book.  Dwight, Adam's friend from the book, didn't even exist in the movie.  Maya had a tragic life and story in the movie because she didn't have a mom and they were basically in a financial crisis.  Maya was also way more abrasive in the movie than she was in the book.  Ian, who was a jerk and a bully in the book didn't have a role in the movie, which was kind of a big deal considering he was a pivotal breaking point in the book.  There were just so many big differences between the two that it didn't even feel like I was watching the movie adaptation of the book.  

Overall, I wasn't impressed with the book or the movie.  The book was better than the movie, but it still lacked the pizazz that I thought it would have.  This obviously isn't a book I can put in my classroom library.  I think that people who enjoy books about mental illnesses would like this, but know that it is a bit of a struggle to get through in my opinion.  I give this 2 stars.