Lily finds her beloved older sister Alice slitting her wrists. Traumatized and nervous about Alice’s return from treatment, Lily worries about her own mental health. She’s partnered for a school project with Micah, a patient at Alice’s treatment center. Upon returning home, Alice seems a shell of her former self. As her mood improves Lily learns her sister stopped taking her meds just as Lily and Micah grow closer. I finally bought a physical copy and wanted to annotate it veryy heavily and that’s exactly what i did. A beautifully realistic, relatable story about mental health and the healing powers of art–perfect for fans of Girl in Pieces and How it Feels to Float. Micah Mendez. Got expelled from his old school. I heard someone found him perched on Deadman’s Cliff, trying to, you know . . .” Damon makes a throat-slitting motion with his thumb. They embark on an art project for school, which involves finding poetry in unexpected places, and Lily realizes that it is the words she has been swallowing that desperately want to break through. Our Review

Lily realizes that it’s the words she’s been swallowing that desperately want to break through. The novel explores mental illness, familial love, and finding your voice in a tender and heartfelt way that is sure to resonate with readers. However, there are some problematic elements in the book, and the portrayal of mental illness might be outdated. The story takes place in a modern school setting, but there is no aspect of counseling or therapy for the family, not even for Lily, who found her sister before their father rushed Alice to the hospital.It took a long time for me to be a tiny bit interested in this book. I almost gave up quite a few times but I did power through to see the outcome. This one wasn’t my favorite. There were a few things that I liked but most of it I didn’t. The book was almost over before I actually started to enjoy it. It’s never just one grade,” I say, rubbing my temple to momentarily release the tension wrapping my head. Note to self: I have got to get more sleep. “Not all of us can have your raw musical talent.” For all anyone knows, my big sister is still off at college, living in her dorm, staying out too late on weekends. I never mention that she came home a few weeks into freshman year, got into bed, and never got up again. That is, until the Night of the Bathroom floor. Enter Micah, a new student at school with a past of his own. He was in treatment with Alice and seems determined to get Lily to process not only Alice’s experience, but her own. Because Lily has secrets, too. Compulsions she can’t seem to let go of and thoughts she can’t drown out.

What took away from the story was most of the characters. I didn’t feel any connection with them and Lily was the worst. She was very conceited and acted horribly. I know she was dealing with her own issues but she neglected everyone and everything. It was all about her and I wasn’t into that. Not one person in Lily’s family was likable. They all swept things under the rug instead of dealing with things. No, thanks. Books that include characters struggling with their mental health can sometimes feel like a balancing act. They need to be real enough to be relatable but there needs to be some hope too. The author definitely doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff here but there are some rays of sunshine as well. The characters’ thoughts and emotions have an authenticity that are clearly drawn from the author’s lived experience, discussed in the Author’s Note at the end of the book.

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Two months after the Night of the Bathroom Floor, it comes to my attention that I’m losing my shit at an alarming rate. Relatable, heartbreaking, and real, this is a story of resilience–the perfect novel for readers of powerful contemporary fiction like Girl in Pieces and Every Last Word. The role played by the guerrilla poets and the voices they amplified was admirable and one of my favourite additions to this story! The truths their actions allowed to speak, and the outlet it provided others who needed to scream into the void and be heard, even if just a whisper, was touching and my heart soared to see how receptive the majority of the students were to these artistic displays. To see the power of words and art at play, and the healing it can aid was inspiring.

this story has a constant theme of ‘showing the real you can change the world’ and inadvertently, i think that this book being such a raw depiction of what it is like to suffer in silence because someone you love is suffering greater has changed my world and my perception of what i went through when i was younger. While this book delves into some really dark places, at its heart it’s about acceptance. I enjoyed spending time with Lily and Micah as they got to know each other. The process of Lily learning to stop hiding was painful at times but ultimately rewarding. I adored the guerilla poetry.Relaxation will not help me ace this,” I reply without looking up from my notecards, where I’ve written each line of my poem for today’s presentation. i cannot write objectively about this story because this is the first time in my life i have read a book and felt so deeply that i was reading about my own life. my own childhood. 95% of the things that lily went through, i also went through. usually when i read books with such a heavy focus on mental health, it’s just the protagonist who is affected by a ‘diagnosis’ and nothing more. but a story about being the person in such close proximity to the one that breaks is so important because it can feel so lonely and so consuming and you often feel like you have no reason to be sad because someone you love so deeply has it worse and they broke first. I watch the scene like a movie reel: Gifford calling up the first row of students to read their poems. Sam gets up and reads hers, a rhyming, iambic-pentameter metaphor about violin strings stretched too thin.