Young Adults, Ages 14+
Words on Bathroom Walls
"If 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?
PRAISE
“Creates a psychologically tense story with sympathetic characters while dispelling myths about a much-feared condition.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Despite heavy subject matter, Adam is hilarious and infinitely lovable, and the ending is hopeful and realistic rather than happily-ever-after and contrived.” —The Hub, YALSA
“A welcome novel that doesn’t treat schizophrenia as an unavoidable sentence of doom and that allots friendship and romance equal weight with mental illness.” —Kirkus Reviews
In this Amazon Best Book of the Month--with a very timely theme around girls and their bodies--a teen rewrites sex education, one viral post at a time.
FOR PARENTS & YOUNG READERS
A Note on Content
This book deals with mental illness, hallucinations, mild romance, brief profanity, appropriate for middle and high school kids.
mental illness ∙ therapy themes ∙ light romance
BEHIND THE BOOK
A Note From Julia
[Short personal note — where the story came from, what surprised her in writing it. Two or three sentences.]
