Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada for providing me with the digital galley!!

Much like her well-loved novel "Bunny", this was a WILD ride, let me tell you!
There is certainly a surrealist and absurd lean in Awad's writing, and this is clearly a now fully developed style and voice that she is using to tell her weird tales.
In this book, we read the story of Miranda, a washed-up theatre actress turned theatre department professor, who also has chronic pain from a life-altering stage injury. The bones of the story are that Miranda really wants to put on "All's Well That Ends Well" but her students are insisting on "Macbeth", to the point of mutiny. Then she meets three mysterious men who promise they will help her, and everything devolves from there.
In this book, the lack of sense was a bit more grounded than in "Bunny", and in most instances where I was following a complex series of events, I could see the current that underpinned them and perhaps leant a bit of reasoning, unlike the former. It was important to remain focused and follow every word because without doing that, this is not a novel that holds your hand or gives you extra context clues— you can't space out, readers!!! You have to stay vigilant and focused.
That potentially means that anyone not pulled in by the story is going to seriously struggle with reading this, as Awad seems to be an all-in kind of author, but that is fine with me because I love magical realism, even if I am left a little wanting for complete clarity!
Similar to how I felt reading "Bunny", I had a profound sense of dizzy confusion at the end of this book. This is not totally a bad thing, and I actually quite appreciate an ending that doesn't simply hand over closure to the reader, because truly, how often are things like that in reality?
Even while having to make several assumptions about the meaning of some vague conclusions, I found this to be entirely enjoyable and action-packed, and I was never bored. A brilliant piece of winding confusion that will certainly sate the appetite of any of her loyal readers desperate for more from her!

Literary novels/women's fiction are usually a hit or miss for me, and this one was a meh. I'm not sure what I think of this one yet... Might have to reread.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Awad is a master at writing unlikable characters that keep you hooked on the story.
Miranda is bitter and angry at the world. She is plagued by the chronic pain that dictates her life and takes everything from her. She attempts to gain back control by putting on a production All's well that ends well, despite the rejection from her students and faculty who want to do Macbeth.

I really enjoyed the parallels between the story line and Shakespeare's all’s well that ends well and Macbeth. I don’t think that being unfamiliar with Shakespeare will take away from a reader's ability to enjoy the story.

The question of magic or madness gets brought up. It reminded me of the themes in Jacksons Haunting of Hill House. Miranda going through a journey of delusion and guilt tied in with the supernatural. The story's ability to keep you guessing and wondering how her actions are perceived by the people around her is a real strength of the book. I binged it in a day I kept wanting more!

The plot is weird and twisted and satirical. It takes your expectations and turns them on their head. What a wonderful weird wayward book.

Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I have mixed feelings about this book. I was drawn to the book based on the description that it was "darkly funny" and "hilarious" but I didn't find it was very funny. The inner monologue of the main character is brutally honest and not subtle but I wouldn't describe this as "hilarious" - dark or otherwise. The character's journey with chronic pain and the changes her relationships experience when things change for her are what kept me reading. I was also intrigued for the "reveal" behind the change in her circumstances which never came but perhaps that wasn't the point of the book. Readers expecting a nice and clean resolution should be warned - there isn't one in this book. While the book is quite well written and vivid, I feel it wasn't really for me. I picked up the book expecting something funny which may be what coloured my reading of it.

This was a twisted, harrowing story. I knew I would love it, after all, Awad's unique narrative voice won me over in Bunny. The blurry quality of "all's well" made my reading experience feel like a fever dream. It's set in the same unsettling universe as her previous novel; the main setting is a decrepit campus dripping with elements of magical realism. The protagonist, Miranda, is an ailing professor who was on track to become a legendary actress when an accident prematurely ended her career. Miranda is cynical, unlikeable, and overall an unreliable narrator. While I'd probably give her a poor rating on RateMyProf, she is such a fascinating character to read about, and the reader's ability to the world through her eyes really contributes to the visceral strangeness of the novel.
I also think this book provided a brutally honest portrayal of chronic pain while offering insight into the way female patients' problems are dismissed in the medical industry.
Fans of the dark academia genre will enjoy this cerebral, visceral read.

I can't decide I feel about this book. On one hand, I feel like some of the elements people love about it went over my head. Like I didn't get any dark humour from this... But the character of Miranda and her experience throughout the book did keep me going. It was kind of interesting to read about Miranda's relationships with people and how they changed when her chronic pain was gone.

All's Well was definitely a wild ride but at the end, I was left feeling like "that's it?".

Mona Awad has done it again!!!!!!! This book was absolutely off the walls surreal. And I loved every minute of it.

Like in Bunny, this story follows an unreliable narrator who goes through experiences that make you question what is real and what is not. Also like in Bunny, I can see how the reviews on this book may be divisive if you don't know what you're getting into (...or if you don't have an open mind/imagination). This level of insanity and strangeness is probably not for everybody.

However, for me, this kind of absurdity just ticks off all of my boxes! I absolutely love stories that blur the lines between reality and insanity. Second guessing everyone and everything as the story progresses always leaves me wanting more. Mona Awad's writing style is so energetic and frantic. As a reader you really feel like you're submerged in the madness. There were moments that I almost felt claustrophobic while reading this.

Witty, exciting, and insanely clever, this book is filled with dark humor and an almost magical twist that will leave you bewildered. I cannot wait to see what Mona Awad comes up with next.

Many thanks to to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the ARC!

Mona Awad is for sure one of the most original and imaginative authors I've read from. Bunny is my all time favourite book, so naturally I put a lot of weight on All’s Well, whether I meant to or not, and I’m so happy to say that I really enjoyed it. It has her inimitable, vivid prose that I can’t get enough of, but this time the humour is much more scarce. The tone is a lot more dramatic and sensitive, and it is absent of the campy fun present in Bunny. I’ll admit, it took me a while to get into, but soon enough I was immersed, however I wouldn’t say it is the most enjoyable read because it follows a miserable woman who is in excruciating pain for most of the book. At times, it drags a bit, but in the end it slowly builds to a chaotic, nightmarish climax and one of my favourite endings to a book I’ve ever read. And even though I’m not familiar with Macbeth and All’s Well that Ends Well, I picked up on what she was going for easily enough. The biggest complaint I had was that the characters never felt real and developed, aside from our main three: Miranda, Ellie and Brianna. Overall, Mona Awad’s latest release did not disappoint. Because the internet loved comparing Bunny to other things, I would describe All’s Well as a clever mix of Black Swan, Eileen and The Love Witch. I already want to reread it, and as always, I’m looking forward to seeing what Mona Awad does next.

I'm not sure what I think of this book. Part of me thinks that some of it was too cerebral and over my head to fully appreciate. Definitely not a crowd pleaser type of book. There was a lot of allegory (some of which I could identify and some of which I could not.) I actually loved all the Shakespeare references throughout and learning (and re-learning) about it. The depictions of chronic pain in the first act are powerful and painful to read and they go on just long enough that you think you cannot take any more (I might have DNFed at that point if not for the fact I was reading this as an ARC). This makes the next act so much more compelling and a comparative joy to read until Miranda's manic escalation becomes so trippy that I started to literally lose the plot and I started to skim toward the end. The blurb of this book bills it as "darkly funny". It's certainly dark but I didn't find it funny. I am currently reading lots of light books lately so I recognize my perspective might be skewed. The writing is high quality but the story wasn't right for me.

As gloriously unhinged and wild as Bunny is. There’s a quality imbued in the voice Awad creates for her characters that feel almost like Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness mixed with her letters. Where it’s just this is both how I think, a high degree of verisimilitude, and there’s no censor whatsoever. Coupled with very dynamic scene cuts and frenetic meter, there really just isn’t anything like this or Bunny (the only two books I’ve read of Awads’ work).

This feels like it hits so fine a point regarding societal expectations placed on women; the internalized disassociation of humanity from empathy, especially from those who particularly would benefit from it; the ways in which those with chronic pain are erased and stymied and actively misbelieved. Especially the latter. I have friends with fibromyalgia and the years of undiagnosed bullshit they went through from doctors who claimed it was all psychosomatic or “just stress” is actually astounding.

This book, to me, who knows nothing of the play this parodies and parallels, All’s Well That Ends Well, felt like this book was all about exploring inverted power dynamics as much as the higher societal concerns mentioned above. At a base, human level Miranda, the main character is simply not able to get what she needs from people and is not seen as someone of value whatsoever, all due to her pain. Though this is all heavily from Miranda’s perspective, which shifts from very close psychic distance to something completely dissociative at apt and telling times, I think that this perspective lens itself well to a commonality any reader will experience, simply because everyone, at some point or another, has probably felt like a burden before. And yet very few have also had the additional component of a disability of some kind.

While writing about alienation the reader is able to surmount the internalized societal standards of able-bodied, hyper-sexualized, women who lack agency in their lives due to these projections.

It then also counters this with the simultaneous empowerment and surprising lack of agency the opposite would have, which I thought was quite interesting. Heroine and villainous in one. And eminently relatable due to the structure.

Where this faltered a bit for me was the beginning. Awad keeps you coming with her unique prose—something that, I think, will either click with you or it won’t—but you really do feel Miranda’s pain. It is actually difficult to empathize with her at the start. And we know why. But the book does such a good job of casting the reader as a judgemental critic that it can be a bit of a slog.

The wild thing is that when it’s inverted you’re right there with the characters, reappraising Miranda in terms of patriarchal standards. Even when she’s empowered and villainous it’s also horrific, and that’s the beauty of this text, in my opinion..

Will everyone struggle through the around 25% to get there? I’m not sure. The nice thing is that for the people who have issues with the first portion, I can say that probably the book is About exactly said issues. Judge it by the whole story and all that. But who hasn’t put things aside? This is why, I think possibly like Bunny, this really depends if you click with Awad’s voice or not.

I have a feeling as thematically robust as this book was for me, I think I missed some things simply by now being familiar with the play it references and not really knowing plays, in the same way knowing MFA’s and being a huge literary nerd really helped me appreciate Bunny. I’m somewhat in the dark regarding the metaphor, allegory situation when it comes to Miranda and Helen, plays and productions, in general, and theatre “stuff” in general.

Even still, I adore this book.

There are brilliantly created characters and some great scenes. Word play comes like arrows. It's a great premise but in the end, the writing is too clever by half.

The perfect mix between horror and dark comedy, All's Well has a bit of a slow start but quickly becomes impossible to put down.

Miranda Fitch is a domineering theatre professor whose acting days were cut short by injury. Determined to put on a production of All's Well that Ends Well – the very play that she was injured in – despite her students' insistence on performing Macbeth, Miranda attracts the attention of three shadowy, Shakespearean-witch-esque men that grant her the ability to transfer her pain to others. But in true Shakespearean witch fashion, supernatural gifts are not always what they seem. The farther Miranda pushes with the production, the more that euphoria and madness bleed together.

Though the plot of All's Well is incredible, its insistence on putting you into Miranda's head is where it truly shines. From depression to being drunk on power, fear to bitterness, Awad does an excellent job of making Miranda's psychology haunting. Watching Miranda, particularly at her worst, is like watching a car crash: morbidly fascinating, impossible to look away.

The ending of All's Well is by far the strongest I've read in a long time. I don't want to give any spoilers (everyone deserves to read it for themselves!), but Awad does an incredible job of interweaving magic and delusion, building tension that doesn't let up until the last page. If you find yourself discouraged by the novel's relatively slower start, press on. The ending is well worth it.

As much as I absolutely loved this novel (you know a book is good when immediately after finishing an e-arc, you go to pre-order a physical copy), I do want to mention that although it's being marketed as a dark comedy and many parts are humorous, they predominantly come at the beginning. As the novel progresses the comedy slips away, replaced with horror and suspense. While I definitely enjoyed this shift, it is worth noting that the majority of the book is more horror than comedy.

Many thanks to Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This is not a book that I would typically read, but I thought I needed a change in venue.

All's Well had me on a roller coaster ride of what addiction to pain killers can do to someone. JJust getting over double knee replacements, made me even more aware of the dependence that we can put on those pain killers and the effects (addictions) that can result.
Miranda Fitch is living that nightmare with chronic pain and the dependence on drugs just to get through the day. As a theater prof, she must put on a play with the help of her students. She chooses All's Well that Ends Well, the play that had seen her dissolve into the pained today she lives.
Needless to say there are many twists and turns in this story that have you shaking your head, but in the end, All's Well That Ends Well!

Felt like i was going quite mad when reading this book. Wonderfully written, with unlikable characters and the theater made for a book that was both interesting yet I did not feel empathy for anyone. All is not Well it seems. The theater director falls off a stage and seeming from grace too and never really recovers. But is she slowly going mad because she;s in pain or is she in pain because shes slowly going mad? It was a quick read, that was quite witty at times but also contained an undercurrent of the uncomfortable.

Thank you Netgalley for this arc

Thank you @NetGalley for this eARC of #AllsWell


Miranda is living in a nightmare, after an accident caused an early end to her acting career, her pain has caused her the loss of her husband career and those close to her. Working teaching in a university in a seemingly failing theatre program, all’s not well.

Until she meets three strange men, one strange drink and a conversation later. Miranda wakes up feeling better than she’s ever been, all’s well in fact.

This book was extremely well written, if you enjoy Shakespeare.
However it just wasn’t for me, it was almost too much going on for me to wrap my brain around.

So overall, well written, Read it if you enjoy Shakespeare, but not for me.

If this isn’t the most deliciously dark read ever, I don’t know what is.

Miranda has chronic pain as a result of falling off stage just when her career was about to take off. Now, she’s in her mid-thirties and is a theatre professor who can barely move without pain lighting fires throughout her body. To Miranda’s chagrin, everyone in her life is tired of her complaining about it and they keep telling her it must be in her head, that she’s being theatric about it. All the same, Miranda is about to start rehearsals for this year’s play, All’s Well That Ends Well by Shakespeare.

One evening she goes to a dive bar and meets three men in suits who seem to know everything about her. They offer her a golden remedy with the promise that it will cure all of her ailments. And that’s how this darkly funny and bizarre tale unfurls from there.

This story is told in its entirety from Miranda’s perspective and you really get insight into all of her anxious and depressed thoughts. She reminisces about the days when she was a stunning, able-bodied woman with an adoring husband. She covets the strong and lithe bodies of her students. She wants her old life back.

The discussions on female pain and how able-bodied people, sometimes, perceive it were spot on. Also, the analysis on how disabled people are sometimes treated by able-bodied people was very realistic.

Nerdy Latin Language Fact: The name Miranda is derived from the Latin ‘mirari’ and in this gerundive form means she who is to be admired, to be amazed at. I don’t know if the author specifically chose the name ‘Miranda’ for her main character with this in mind, but either way, it is genius and very fitting.

Needless to say, I absolutely loved this one and can’t wait for more from the author.

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the arc in exchange for my honest opinions.

Woah! Unlike any book I've ever read. Closed my e-reader about an hour ago and my mind is still whirling...was it Miranda? or Ellie? or those three strange men in black? And how many references to Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Macbeth did I miss?

Miranda Fitch, actor turned theatre professor after a bad fall from the stage, lives with chronic pain and little hope of recovery. She's barely holding on - to her sanity, her patience, her last friend, her job. Then, after an evening at her favourite bar, in the company of three strange men in black, her pain falls away. And Mona Awad takes the reader on a wild and crazy ride inside Miranda's thoughts as she experiences exultant joy, no pain, and easy movement for the first time since that fateful fall from the stage.

With a full cast of characters thanks to the theatre program's annual Shakespeare production, All's Well highlights how conditioned we are to respond "all's well" when asked how we are, even if we have to fake it. Mona Awad invites readers to ponder just how far some will go to get away a painful reality to a state where everything is truly well.

Not much time has elapsed since I finished reading this one, but I'm already thinking it could be worth another read. But second time around, I'll read (at least a synopsis of) the two Shakespeare plays that are woven into the tale of Miranda and her cast of characters.

I can properly describe all the things that this book makes me feel. This book is really a rollercoaster from start to finish and is written in a way that really makes you feel things. Margaret Atwood was right and she has good taste! I feel like you just need to experience this book because its so well written and the characters are just so great.

The first chapter lived up to the “dark comedy” description but after that I really didn’t see any humour. Being a person that suffered with chronic pain I can empathize with Miranda. You really do feel like you are going to go crazy if somebody doesn’t believe you or help you. You will try anything to get some relief.

I found the book so hard to follow as I tried to grasp what was real, a dream, imagined or perhaps magic. Her inner monologues went on way to long and I found myself browsing through those parts to get to something interesting.

I like how there were some references to MacBeth with the three men perhaps actually being witches. Otherwise I didn’t find much to like about this book. I like to be entertained or to feel part of a book but this one was just too out there for me.

I regret that I had a lot of difficulty getting into this book, and struggled throughout. It was not what I expected or needed at this time while shut in from the COVID threat and chronic pain. I feel that perhaps I am the wrong person to review a book that is rated highly by many readers. The description appealed to me as it was mentioned as being 'darkly funny' and 'hilarious'. That sounded like a book that would be humourous and would lift my spirits during this unsettled time.

I thought I should be empathizing with Miranda, but found her both sad, unfortunate, and not at all likable. She is employed as a theatre director at a university. She is determined to force her students to perform 'All's Well That Ends Well' for the annual stage production, going against her casts' wishes to put on the Scottish play (Macbeth) instead. "All's Well' reminds her of her early, painless days as a promising actress until an accident left her in excruciating pain. She can barely stumble in to work, her mind fuzzy from pain and overuse of painkillers. She resents her theatre students for their youth, beauty, high spirits, good health, and their voiced dislike of the play. She has become overly dependant on an assortment of painkillers, chiropractors, physiotherapists, acupuncturists, with no favorable results. She also will mix in booze with her medications. Doctors tend to ignore or disbelieve complaints, especially from women. She has alienated most friends and lost her husband due to her misery. Her acquaintances barely tolerate her disability and suffering, and her job is in jeopardy.

The narrative is through a stream of consciousness, an inner monologue where we enter Miranda's mind. It is not a pleasant or comfortable place to be. She may be descending into madness. The story mixes reality with the surreal. While drinking in a bar, still on pain medication, she meets some characters who add a touch of magic realism. These new characters are aware of her mindset, her chronic pain, her search for a cure, and much about her past. They predict a more promising future for her.

I found this to be a melancholy, depressing read and was oblivious to its humor. I know many readers will find this a compelling and satisfying read. I was neither engaged with the character or the storyline and am sorry for this. I received the ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in return for an honest review.