“All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.”

This is my second Mona Awad book, and I’m pleased to say that I’m absolutely hooked! Awad combines surreal elements to set a haunting dream-like stage (pun intended) that is both humorous and completely subversive. There are Chuck Palahniuk elements in both All’s Well and Bunny but still reads as something original. This is the novel I was most excited to receive an eARC for, and it lived up to all of my weird girl expectations (and then some). Do yourself a favor and preorder this book immediately!

Release date is August 3rd.

Thanks so much to NetGalley & Simon and Schuster for this eARC in return for an honest review!

In this literary horror, Miranda is the director of the theatre department of a small college who has struggled with chronic debilitating pain since she fell from the stage years ago, ending her acting career. No doctor or physical therapist has ever been able to aid her pain, so she has turned to drink and pills to keep herself afloat. Amongst her own issues, she is determined for the department to put on All's Well That Ends Well, one of the problem plays, for the annual Shakespeare production, despite the wishes of the students and staff who she is losing her control over.

Bunny, also by Awad, was my favorite book of last year and has become one of my favorite books of all time. I jumped at the chance to read this in advance and I was not disappointed in the slightest. Like in Bunny, the main character is an unreliable narrator who experiences things that are never confirmed to be real or in their head in their inebriated state. Readers can feel Miranda lose her grip on reality and are just as shaken and confused as she is; Awad truly has a gift for being able to put the reader in the shoes of the main character. Her writing style is, in my mind, perfect - when you look at one sentence by itself, it is as simple as can be, but when they are strung together one after the other, the result is a dizzying tableau that conjures up intense emotion. You cannot always root for Miranda, her emotions, motives, and actions, but you want everything to turn out for her, which struck me as Shakespearean. There are other allusions to Shakespeare, such as the three men, on top of the plays being performed. My only concern with this story is that the mysticism surrounding chronic pain in this may come across as trivializing chronic pain, though I cannot believe that someone could read this and not feel a deep empathy for those with such conditions regardless of the main character's journey. Overall, this was a complete joy to read and I cannot wait to get my hands on a physical copy upon its release. Fans of Bunny will not be disappointed.