Wow, wow, wow! Just completed All’s Well by Mona Awad. This was an ARC provided by NetGalley for an honest review. This was an amazing read! The main character Miranda has all sorts of healthcare issues which are causing her excruciating pain. She has lost most of her life as she knew it due to her medical issues. She is that person who you ask how they are doing because you know they always feel bad but you really don’t care to know the specifics. That is this woman’s life. She is hard to love but you can feel such deep sympathy for her. She is still passionate about one thing which is her directorship of the Shakespearean play All’s Well that Ends Well. That is the only thing keeping this woman going. One night she gains the ability to heal herself and in so doing gets a certain amount of revenge on those who treated her abysmally due to her pain. But her achieved health comes at a cost! Miranda was such a dimensional character. You rooted for her, you wished she would not whine, you loved her determination and finally you loved her humanity. I rated this book as 4 stars and can highly recommend it.

Miranda, who has had chronic pain for years, by a twist of mysterious witchery becomes pain free. She is directing Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well to a reluctant group of college students in a failing theater program, all while her pain increases and is unabated by the myriad physiotherapist and doctor's appointments she attends. An altogether weird encounter changes her pain and also the trajectory of her life. Suddenly, All's well.

Reading the first few chapters, I didn't know if I would like this story. I understood Miranda was in constant excruciating pain, but she also was judgmental of everyone around her in a petty way. I was glad when she was alleviated of her pain, but overall she wasn't a likable character. This kind of worked for the rest of the novel, especially when she becomes more manic later in the story. The story started to get a lot more engaging with the changes happening in Miranda's life. It was intriguing to see how people reacted to her new state of elation. I was even rooting for her at times, liking her newfound resiliency toward people who were trying to bring her down, even while she was avoiding looking directly at the bad things she had done. I enjoyed the parallels between the events in the play and the events in Miranda's life. Miranda didn't seem to have much agency in her life before or after her pain was alleviated, and I do think there was a message in that. There was also some good commentary on the misunderstanding of chronic pain, how people struggle to understand what is not visible to them.

This was a fairly engaging read on the whole. I do think it dragged at times and was a little repetitive when we were in Miranda's head. I usually enjoy being sucked into the psychology of the protagonist, but she went on a lot of thought tangents and had extended conversations with people in her head, always assuming what they were thinking about her. I didn't particularly like the ending. It felt like there was a lot of action and it led to something, but that something wasn't very satisfying.
I received this as an ARC e-book from Netgalley.

In keeping with her previous books, in which witchcraft and darkness and breakdowns of body and mind are all fair game, Awad here goes back to college, this time focusing on theater teacher Miranda. Miranda, in a precarious position at work and dealing with chronic pain, casts a spell and summons a trio of odd men. Her pain transfers to a despised student, Miranda's crush is suddenly smitten with her, and her favorite student is about to be a star. But what's really going on? How much of what happens is strictly in Miranda's mind, and how has her chronic pain shaped her perceptions of the events that unfold in the book? This is completely unnerving horror, but spiked with moments of empathy and sympathy, and for me, also a person who deals with chronic pain, a thought-provoking read. I want other people to read this immediately so I can talk with people about it.

I did not enjoy this as much as I had hoped. I found the narrative incredibly difficult to follow and, at times, seemed to ramble on for far too long. Overall this was n entertaining read, but could have been significantly shorter.

Miranda is a former theater actor and current college theater director who suffer immesurable and seemingly unending physical suffering. She can barely think of anything outside of her own all-consuming pain. She feels weak and broken, and that even things in her life she has a tiny bit of control over are being taken away from her. Until one night when she meets three mysterious men who somehow know everything about her and her troubles. Then everything serendipidously begins to fall into place. Her physical pain is reduced to the point where she can actually enjoy life and all her bad fortunes turn to good. But at what cost?

Althoug I enjoyed the psychological thriller aspect of this novel, and even enjoyed the mysterious magical element, I couldn't get past the self-indulgent over-analyzation of Miranda. Her laments on her pain and the unfairness of her life went on for pages at a time and became incredibly frustrating, as I'm sure the author meant it to be. So that we as the reader could fully understand how all-encompassing chronic pain can be. But even when she is relieved of the pain, she still harps on it, and as a result the story takes forever to unfold. And when it did, I had almost lost interest.

I can definitely see the appeal to most readers, and the writing is strong, clear , and in the category of excellent. However, it was not an enjoyable or satisfying read for me.

I missed out on an ARC of Bunny, so I was super excited to get this one because Mona Awad seemed right up my alley, and I can see her becoming one of my favorite writers now. She’s super funny and is not at all afraid to get weird with her stories. This started off pretty funny and kind of reminded me of The Convalescent, and that’s the direction that I thought it was going on, but then magic kind of comes into play like a third of the way in and it just gets bonkers. I think there were a bunch of Shakespeare references that kind of went over my head, but the ones I caught were pretty clever. Man, I really liked this book a lot.

This was... oh boy... I’m so overwhelmed right now... I don’t know what words will be appropriate to express my feelings about this reading experience...

Strange... extraordinary...frustrating...blurry... illusionary...disturbing...sad...delirious...wild...different ...original...exhausting...dark...depressing ...weird...complex...conflicted...

I can keep writing those words for several more pages but it is so hard for me to put them in proper sentences because this book extracts the opposite feelings from you at the same time. You love it, you hate it, you love to hate it, you hate to love it! But for a long time I haven’t been book-drunk or suffered from intense book-gover ( which is terrible version of hungover! The meaningless words poured out of my mind at the same time! )

I have to admit: my heart ached for Miranda who suffers from chronic back pain, an invisible pain that cannot be treatable, costed her career, forced her to be an assistant professor at academia for theater program.

She’s in pain. Her pain is contagious. You can feel it in your guts. Your soul feels it! She’s crying for help! She’s absolutely unreliable narrator, taking awkward hallucinatory baths and popping pills like candies to heal herself! Of course she cannot get proper result! When you stuck with her mind, you feel like you found soulmate of Raoul Duke’s drug induced, hallucinatory vision at Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, taking long tour at her distorted realities.

She’s teaching Shakespeare as her life turns into a Shakespearean tragedy: an actress who’s dying to perform but a traffic accident already sealed her faith so she resents the young actresses-her own students who already replaced her. The play they work on All’s Well that Ends Well. An ironic name for her unresolved issues, incessant suffering, delusional mind trips.

At some part, I felt like I was walking in the foggy road, losing my path throughout my reading journey. The book’s abrupt direction to fantasyland dragging you to the witch craft, more illusionary baths, awkward strangers in the bar changing your vision kind of more mind numbing experiences leave you at a strange zone.

Conclusion is full of unanswered questions. Some blanks you fill with your own imagination!

Overall: the author’s different, interesting, extremely direct and realistic to the chronic illness was the best thing about this novel. I loved her choice to build the story at small New England liberal arts college like she did at her previous marvelous work “Bunny”.

Miranda was powerful, connectable character you truly care about. The thin line between fantasy and fiction was a little intense and confusing for me. I skip some parts because it was truly exhausting experience for me but writing is uniquely creative and original which I absolutely enjoyed a lot!

Special thanks to NetGalley and Simon& Schuster for sharing this digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest thoughts.

I came close to leaving this book during the first part. I was put off by Miranda's total focus on her pain. It was her only focus and worse was her going to different therapies that did no good and often seemed to exacerbate her symptoms. She blindly followed what each male practitoner told her to do even when it hurt her. I was becoming depressed just reading about her miserable life. There was more action in Part Two and things started to look up as Miranda began to stage Shakespear's All's Well with her college students. Even that was over the top ridiculous. As I headed into Part Three I was hoping for some closure but it left me thinking " what the heck? " This may appeal to some people but it was not the book for me.

I received an Advanced Reader's Copy from Simon & Schuster through NetGalley. The opinions expressed are entirely my own.
#All'sWell #NetGalley

The premise of the book is very interesting. But I have to admit that I had a very difficult time reading it. The writing style included a lot of short choppy sentences that were hard for me to follow. I wasn't enthralled with this book at all. It was just ok.

BLACK SWAN meets William Shakespeare, ALL'S WELL was my introduction to Mona Awad. and what a wicked experience it was! While I found the novel to be inventive and potent, it is also quite exhausting- narrator Miranda, indiscriminately popping pills and taking mysterious hallucinatory baths is as unreliable of a narrator as they come. In drug and/or spell-induced (?) trips, Miranda spins violently out of control, resulting in tireless chapters of psychedelic gobbledygook. The device does work; these moments have a bad-trip dizzying effect, and yet, the purpose often gets lost in the style. Somewhat understandable considering her obvious talent, it often seems like Awad is showing off just how weird she can get rather than always serving Miranda's story.

All that being said, where Awad really succeeds is in her characterization of an actress who can't act anymore. Miranda is devastatingly familiar- there is such tenuous preciousness within those who strive to have a life in the theatre and Awad's narrator, who lost it all after a tragic accident, is driven to madness. It's all perfectly Shakespearean and yet, captures a sad truth about aging actors: stage careers have expiration dates, there will always be someone younger, prettier, more talented and past success is ephemeral.

Teaching because she can no longer do, Miranda resents her students so much so that she can hardly decipher one from the other and uses them as pawns to reconstruct her glory days as a classical leading lady. The classroom dynamic is so well detailed and captured, and as a result, very funny in its biting absurdity. The novel sparkles in these classroom moments not only because Miranda is well-drawn, but because there are many characters around her to anchor the reader in what's actually happening. Through Miranda's assistant director, Grace, her faculty-nemesis Fauve, and her students, we are anchored in the context of any given moment. These departures from Miranda's inebriated perspective are ever-refreshing and necessary.

Ultimately though, I'm not entirely sure I understood what happens in ALL'S WELL. There are so many questions left unanswered, so many little details that Awad absolutely fixates on for seemingly no greater purpose. I'm not convinced that a character being debilitatingly unwell is enough of a justification for the madness that ensues in this novel. It's a little bit like when a character wakes up at the end of the story and it was all a dream, and when is that ever completely satisfying?

It delivers on its promise of "no holds barred," but of what, I'm not sure. Can't say if I would've chosen this if I'd been aware of other worldly elements, but that may be an attraction for some readers. What it did need was some editing, some acceleration of pace, less repetition.

All’s Well by Mona Awad is a weird and wonderful book. A book unflinching in its portrayal of chronic pain, that forces the reader to sit in miranda’s discomfort in such an immersive and encompassing way that, by the time Miranda starts making decisions, or rather, choosing inaction, that results in other people suffering, you understand how she could do that, even while internally condemning her willful ignorance and hypocrisy. Reading some other reviews to try and orient myself about my feelings on the book, I came across a few saying that the scenes about Miranda’s experiences with doctors not listening to her never really came to anything, never made their point about people who experience chronic pain, especially women, not being taken seriously by health care professionals. To which I would say, how would you know that was the point if she never made it? The repetition itself is what makes the point, much like the repetition in the prose of certain phrases showing us Miranda’s compromised state of mind, repeating the same phrases, giving them different meanings, all serves to help make the reading experience feel like a headlong, dreamlike, exasperating rush that leaves you unable to look away, even when the lurking threat of tragedy never leaves. Speaking of tragedy, and repetition of phrases, my personal favorite use of this device was the phrase “it’s both.” Particularly as it helped put into context, for me, what the book itself is. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? It’s both. It’s a problem play.
My two small critiques of the book are the sort of things that can be hard to determine whether the author included out of a place of ignorance or bigotry, or with intention of them being read as Miranda’s personal failings in those areas. There’s a through line of this idea of “the fat man”, first used in a metaphorical example of her pain, that there’s a chair on her foot, a fat man sitting on the chair, crushing her, and then in an only slightly more tangible sense, when the three men begin to appear to her, one of them being continually described as “the fat one.” I know Awad has written on the experience of fatness before in her debut novel, and has experienced being fat herself, and I haven’t, so it really isn’t my place to tell her how she can and can’t speak about it here, and ultimately I understand this is an existing literary symbol. However, I think it’s something other readers should be aware of going in, and would like to hear more opinions, particularly from fat people, on its use in this context. The other instance was one line in chapter seven, in which she is having a meeting with the dean and two other men, who are referred to as Comb-over and Bow Tie, presumably higher ups of the school, about putting on a different play due to Briana, who’s parents contribute heavily to the program, being unhappy with the choice of All’s Well That Ends Well. The men attempt to sway Miranda with promises of improvements to the stage, to which she replies that she understands, they need money. Then she has this piece of internal dialogue: “I picture the dean, Comb-over and Bow Tie idling on a dark street corner, wearing spandex dresses full of holes. Thigh high patent leather boots. Long blond wigs. Thumping the windshields of passing cars with the meaty palms of their hands.” I can understand the intent of brashness and shock value in this line, and again, maybe this is meant to exemplify a flaw on the character’s part, but as this line is extremely disparaging of trans women, sex workers, and the intersections thereof, I feel it would’ve been better to not include it at all.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a book for any lover of theater, supernatural, Shakespeare or just an unusual premise.
Miranda Fitch is a depressed theater professor in a dying college theater program.. Miranda' suffers from great pain due to a fall off a stage during her own acting career. As she struggles to direct a play, placate the dean and parents and balance her social life she finds a surreptitious solution to all of her problems - but at what cost? I loved the dark comedy, irony and the underlying theme of magic. Highly recommend!

All’s Well is the latest from Mona Awad – a strange, perplexing, but oh-so-satisfying novel that fits well with her previous works. Awad’s bold style and irreverent, caustic voice creates an interesting world that smoothly blends the real with the surreal.

Like her previous novel, Bunny, Awad sets her latest at a small New England liberal arts college. The novel’s protagonist, Miranda Fitch, is a former actress dealing with chronic pain, an invisible illness that has pushed her away from her career on stage and to a life in academia as an assistant professor for a theatre program where she oversees the direction of an annual undergraduate Shakespeare production. Miranda resents her youthful band of performers, and when they push back against her choice of play, Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, the book plunges into strange quasi-magical terrain that remarkably stays grounded in Miranda’s experience.

As in Bunny, Awad has an incredible capacity to create a sympathetic heroine in Miranda. She is a fully-fleshed character, one that the reader can root for even as she devolves into her own theatrical narcissism. A strength of the book also lies in its ability to make the strange seem almost regular, which is further reflected in Miranda’s fight against her invisible disease. I worried as the book neared its conclusion that Awad would feel compelled to wrap things up too cleanly, but she smartly resists any impulse to overexplain the book’s mythology.

Fans of Awad’s previous work will no doubt enjoy All’s Well, which builds and improves on her oeuvre.

I love the theatre. I love it so much that I spell it “theatre” not “theater”. In my younger, more vulnerable years, I performed a lot on stage. I was Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace, Biff in Death of a Salesman, and so many others. Biff was my favorite and most challenging role. I’ve thought a lot about that role in the years after and I want to do it again because I have so much more to bring to that role.

There are three more theatrical things I was to do before I slough my mortal coil. I want to be in the musical Next to Normal (but I would have to prevent myself from crying each performance), Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and I want to do a Shakespeare play. I don’t even want a meaty role, I just want to speak in iambic pentameter on stage.

All’s Well by Mona Awad caught my eye right away. The cover is just beautiful. And terrifying. Terrifyingly beautiful. Beautifully terrifying. I think that last one is the correct term. Anyway, using the comedy mask as your book cover is a surefire way to get a theatre nerd to pick up your book.

What awaited me inside was nothing short of confusing and brilliant.

Miranda is a former stage actress who now teaches theatre at a college after taking a nasty fall while performing. She muddles through her days in a haze of pain and painkillers all while staging the school’s latest Shakespeare production, All’s Well That Ends Well. Miranda is stuck in the past, always wishing she was back onstage playing Helen, the heroine of All’s Well. Her cast, however, hates the play and wants to do Macbeth instead.

(Sidebar: I will say Macbeth in a theatre I don’t give a damn. Theatre superstitions are fun until they get annoying. Of course, my superstition isn’t annoying at all, I just have to go to every actor before the show and shake hands with them while looking them in the eyes, saying “Doctor”. Not annoying at all.)

One night, she meets three strange men who will change her life as long as they can see a good show. Thus begins the incredibly confusing second act of All’s Well.

I don’t want to go into spoiler territory too much because there were parts of this book that made me audibly gasp. It’s weird, it’s strange, it’s funny as hell. There is a lot of magic to this book that is left unexplained (my favorite kind of magic). The last quarter of the book is just stress inducing madness and I am HERE FOR IT.

This book reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books, Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr. It has that same weird magic where you can’t tell if the narrator is dreaming everything or if it is actually happening.

I highly recommend this book, however, it is not a light read. Be prepared to actually do some work with this one. Overall, I give it a 4/5, 8/10. Make sure you grab a copy from your local indie on August 3rd, 2021!

Thanks NetGalley for the eARC!

I absolutely loved this book, with occasional moments of wondering what I was doing spending my time in this way. LOL. Here is what I wrote on Goodreads, where I have it four stars.

I did not know how to rate this book. I am sure that some people will be, "No ... 4 stars ... I don't even know what this is," and others will be "No ... 4 stars ... How could you? If this is not 5 stars, nothing is."

I started. And I kept going willingly. Happily. Wondering whether Miranda would survive? thrive? fall apart? be in a drug-induced coma? spinning along wildly on hallucinogens?

You can read other reviews and get a good sense of the plot, so I am not going to bother. I guess the main thing here is that I loved the manner in which the language wrapped me up in every aspect of Miranda's life.

This book was weird- interesting, page-turning, magic (or mental?).... I couldn’t tell. Miranda suffers from chronic pain from a stage injury she suffered some time ago. There seems to be no cure for it and it’s weighing on her as she prepares for the Shakespeare play she is directing, “All’s’ Well That Ends Well”. The events that happen from that point forward get a bit eerie.
Miranda is somewhat of an unreliable narrator so it left me questing what was happening, what was real? The ending left me with many unanswered questions so I’m hoping the author will divulge the answers in future interviews.

Miranda Fitch is in pain. Very real, 10/10, makes-you-want-to-die, everyday PAIN. The pain is so bad that it keeps her from practicing basic hygiene and she is often wearing the same clothes day in and day out. She takes a ridiculous amount of pills everyday and is disrespected by her students in her theater class. Her pain is real and the way she suffers is unreal. It's all just absolutely horrible for Miranda...until one day it's not. Can her pain come back? Maybe. Can she give her pain to another person? Maybe. Are physical therapists demons that are here to suck health and inflict pain? Also, maybe. This is a Mona Awad book, so pretty much anything is possible...and impossible.

Aside from this being off-the-wall book that catches you completely off guard, I need to say that I know that the pain that Miranda feels in this book is a reality for many women in the world. Miranda has suffered emotional and physical injuries that have left her pain invisible to others and untreatable by professionals. This type of pain is often not understood by peers and can lead to the person feeling isolated from the world. Suicide is common. Even though this book has a slew of unrelatable problems that range from probable witchcraft and magical baths to strangers in bars serving stranger drinks, this book still focuses on the very real problem of invisible pain and how it can destroy a person's life.

An ex-actress turned drama teacher suffering with almost debilitating chronic pain is struggling to keep her job and maintain her authority over her students as they war over which Shakespeare play to perform. Enter the three mysterious weird men who seem to know all about her and suddenly everything in her life changes!

Just when I was so sick of hearing Miranda go on about her pain and lack of sympathy from those treating her, the whole thing changes and Wow! -- What a crazy, unexpected story. Enjoyed this very much!

This darkly funny story explores the world of the theatre and how to deal with seemingly insurmountable pain. This book will especially resonate with readers who catch the references to great works of theatre - and Shakespeare specifically - written throughout the work.

Readers follow the story of Miranda from a wildly inauspicious start to - ultimately - new beginnings. Readers are left wondering how good or bad those new beginnings might end up being.

I wouldn't characterize this as a "light read" by any means, but would highly recommend this work for those people who love theatre and can appreciate just what happens literally behind the scenes as a production comes to life.