Jul 25

Jul 25 All's Well

Author: Mona Awad
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny, a darkly funny novel about a theater professor suffering chronic pain, who in the process of staging a troubled production of Shakespeare’s most maligned play, suddenly and miraculously recovers.

Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged...genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. 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.

TL;DR Review

All’s Well is a weird, frustrating, trippy, impressive, darkly funny story about being a woman with chronic pain. The right readers will love it.

For you if: You like experimental novels and/or Shakespeare.

Full Review

Thank you to Simon & Schuster for sending me a review copy of this book! I’m still not quite sure what I just read, but … in a good way? I haven’t read Bunny, but by all accounts, if you liked that one from Mona Awad, you’ll like this one too. It’s weird — almost psychedelic — darkly funny, and impressively crafted.

The book is about a theatre professor named Miranda Fitch, whose acting career was just taking off when she suffered injuries that still cause her terrible chronic pain today. She can’t walk, can’t sit, can’t live normally at all. But now it’s now been so long that everyone around her is starting to suspect that her pain is psychosomatic, and that she’s just not trying hard enough to get better. At work, she’s determined to stage “All’s Well That Ends Well,” but her headstrong students go behind her back to try to stage Macbeth instead. Then she goes to a dive bar and meets three strange men who seem to know her and her life, and they show her a “trick” — and everything changes.

This is one of those impressive books with a writing style that makes you feel exactly how the main character feels — frustrated and exhausted. It’s written in short sentence fragments that never feel resolved, that pull you through the text in short, stilting, never-ending bursts. We, as readers, are made to question what is real and what is not at every turn. The story spins and swirls around us as Miranda tips further and further over the edge. You’ll also finish it and go … what did I just read?

So this book won’t be for everyone, but if you’re here for trippy, experimental novels (and Shakespeare references!), I think you’ll like this one. It’s crafted in a way that’s just so effective in tackling the subject of ableism, chronic pain, and the way society treats women with it.