Dark, satirical, witty, biting, twisty humor in a Shakespearean theater setting? Sign me up.
The writing is exceptional throughout the book, though the last third does get a little confusing and may not be for everybody. I greatly enjoyed it, however!

sadly, before i could download this title, netgalley took it off their catalog. that means i can’t review this one. HOWEVER, i will be checking in with my library to see if i can get a copy and review it that way

My first Mona Awad novel like many was 'Bunny' and I've been obsessed ever since her writing is intoxicating and infectious. she did not disappoint on her next one. I could not stop talking about this too. friends and family members so much so they wished. id shut up. this is definitely a page-turner that you want to pick up and have on your shelf.

This wasn't quite a home run for me because I had read several OMG Amazing books recently, but it was perfectly fine for a play on Shakespeare.

I wanted to like this book so much, especially because of its focus on chronic pain and how debilitating it can be. Unfortunately, that's where my likes ended. The MC is just too scattered and the book is too repetitive. I rarely DNF books, but I just couldn't bring myself to finish this work.

Good, but disappointing after the brilliance of Bunny…it took me a while to get into it and I put it down for a long spell before finishing.

Mona Awad has written some of the most bizarre and hilarious social commentary-ish novels I have ever read. Her book “Bunny” was utterly original and completely insane — I loved it. This book shares many of Bunny’s virtues, then builds on them with the same wit but bigger ambitions. It’s about a drama professor and retired actress putting on a production of All’s Well That Ends Well, while her students would prefer the Scottish Play. The protagonist is also suffering from crippling (but unseen) pain until she meets a trio of men at a bar, who use supernatural tricks to help her. Yes, the reference to Macbeth’s witchcraft is intentional, and one of the joys of reading the book is the many references to Shakespeare and his plays (but you don’t need to be intimate with them to enjoy the book). The climax of the novel is the actual production of the play and it does not disappoint, with sheer lunacy that also makes perfect sense. Throughout, the humor remains intact and the novel is a joy to experience. I would recommend this book unequivocally, as long as the reader understands that they are in for a wild ride.

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✨All’s Well by Mona Awad✨

Genre: Fiction
Pages: 368

📚 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.

📝When I first read the description for this, I thought it was going to be a dark comedy. I think a better genre classification would be women’s fiction sprinkled with some magical realism.

The book is ultimately about how the world interacts with a woman suffering from invisible pain. Miranda's pain is questioned, her addiction to pain killers is judged and her complaints are barely tolerated. What was striking was the constant dismissal she faced from her medical providers and the other women in her life.

When I first started the book, I disliked Miranda as a character. It wasn't until she was cured that I realized her pre-accident personality was different. She was fun, lively and excited by anything related to the theater. The constant pain and lack of mobility altered her personality. This should be obvious (of course it would), but I think this is something that people neglect. We should all give people a little grace because we never know what they are going through.

The book reads as a continuous inner monologue with a seismic shift in demeanor after meeting the three strange men.

Overall, a unique story with the right dose of magic.

💫Thank you @netgalley for my copy💫

Mona Awad knows pain. She gets it. She really gets it. She really, really, really gets it, in excruciatingly exacting detail, page after page, totally nailing it. On the one hand, I identified with Miranda Fisk and her chronic, invisible pain. I have wished the throbbing, red network of hidden pain could be made visible, like bruises and wounds gushing with blood, so that others would believe it's real, not in our heads. And I know, all too well, this endless parade of doctors, physiatrists (not to be confused with psychiatrists), the testing, the procedures, the false hopes, the blank stares and this weird insistence that pain is mostly mental. Yes, Awad really knows her stuff and articulates it vividly.


We all fall, one of Miranda's physiatrists reminds her. "But sometimes we want to hold on to the pain. Sometimes we have our reasons for not being able to let go."

I had just read those words at a website on Buddhism and in a chapter of Echkhart Tolle's Power of Now, the ridiculous chapter on pain. Also, I had been reading the New Age or Buddhist or Catholic mystic concept, "All is well, and all shall be well." These ideas were left in open tabs on my screen. Then came this NetGalley ARC titles "All's Well," and it's praised by Margaret Atwood, author of "The Tempest," a hilarious tale of a theater director getting prisoners to put on a Shakespeare play. So, this Simon and Schuster novel (not a self-pub!) must be good, right?

Well, the words are cleverly strung together in pretty sentences and vivid prose, but man, oh man, does the self-pitying Miranda wallow in her pain, page after page, I identify with her and those doctors and all those well-meaning friends and loved ones who try but just don't get it. But I don't like being in Miranda's head, her pain body, her Point of View, even after her pain goes away and her body feels young and alive again.

The shift begins when Miranda, perhaps in a drunken haze, meets three men in a bar.

I know, that sounds like the start of a joke. But these men! They're like modern-day, male incarnations of the witches in Macbeth, and they're also more up close, in your face, and personal. They notice Miranda. They notice her pain. They see that she is hurting! "It's a wonder you can stand at all," one says. Who are these men, these men who see her, who know her? They see her pain. More than that, they tell her that pain can move. Yes, really. Pain can switch, easily. "From house to house, form body to body. You can pass it along, you can give it away. Piece by piece." Did I mention that they remind me of the witches in Macbeth? Oh, but they're so much better. They know what to do with trouble. You can give your pain away to someone else. "To those who might need it."

And this is when things get creepy.

We don't understand how it's possible, but it happens. With a mere touch to the wrist, Miranda transfers her pain to one of her most obnoxious acting students. She transfers some to her awful physiatrist, the annoying Mark. She even passes some of it to her beloved (but annoying, of course!) friend Grace. I will not describe how these people shut down, or how Miranda reacts to the reversal of fortune. I will only say that she doesn't strike me as a very nice person.

One weird aspect of the book is the way Miranda left her husband, who tried so hard, but she was this pathetic, sexless, damaged, pain-ridden woman. When she starts feeling miraculously good again, she's all over a guy who reminds her of ex, to the point that she keeps calling this guy the same nickname she had for her husband. It's one of many really weird things about Miranda and her hazy, spacy, feverish new outlook on life. She thinks out loud, it seems, or people read her thoughts, and her thoughts are way out there, as if she were tripping out on some new pain killer.

Seeing Miranda transfer her crippling aches and pains to others (who maybe "needed" this eye opener, this suffering) made me wonder whether Miranda really deserves such a long reprieve. Her attitude continues to be self-absorbed. The three men show up again and again, bringing more miracles, making it possible for Miranda to stage The Tempest when her mutinous students want to put on Macbeth, and all through the novel, references to the Shakespeare plays kept me reading. We keep hearing about Helen, poor martyred Helen, and the jerk who doesn't deserve her love, Bertram. We keep hearing how young Miranda, prior to her descent into pain, played Helen on stage like no other actor before or since.

A subplot involving Ellie and her bath salts kept me wondering. What's the point? Ellie believes Miranda's recovery is thanks to these bath salts which Miranda says she has been using, but for no good reason, she has not. Nope. No salts in her bath, but Miranda lies, routinely. She lies to Ellie. She tells her health care team "Yes, I feel better now," because they apparently cannot accept it when shell tells them their treatments make her pain worse. If something had come of this sad subplot, in which women lie and say they feel better when they don't just to get people to let up already, if some insight or wisdom had unfolded from it, ok, those scenes would justify the amount of space they take up in the novel. But all these long, repetitive, dragging, wearying pages of pain just go nowhere. Oh, Miranda transfers her pain to others, and fear not, these mysterious victims will not remain incapacitated with pain for the rest of their now-miserable lives. There's more "magic" coming. From whence, we will never really know.

And that's unfortunate. Readers invest a lot of time in a writer's flight of fancy, aka a novel, and authors do have some burdon of proof to offer, some way of explaining, of making the impossible seem plausible. No such attempt seems to be made here. Creepy, weird magic happens, and Miranda feels guilt for being an inadvertent practitioner of black magic. Ellie seems to be a more active and cognizant practitioner, getting the universe to comply with her wishes, but it's all hastily summarized, and not even Ellie's concoctions and bath salts can be credited with some of the bad juju or voodoo.

The climax is so weird, I won't even go there. Suffice to say, I found it all disappointing. It all strained credulity past the breaking point, past the sounds of bones literally breaking. The person who falls-- to what looks and sounds like certain death-- just gets up and walks away. Why? What is the point of this impossible plot twist?

There was no one I could like, not even the three men, who go so far as to make "All's Well" come to life again with Miranda, only to walk away disappointed. No, this is not a spoiler; Just when it seemed the three men were figments of Miranda's imagination, someone else describes them, exactly as they had looked to Miranda, so who are they and what really happened here? A more astute reader than I may be able to tell.

Awad can write beautiful prose, but she needs a judicious editor, someone to help her sort out the plot and let the reader escape into a story without all the snarls, pitfalls, and knots.

Miranda Fitch is a theatre Professor at New England college. Due to chronic pain from an accident that ended her acting career, she is not emotionally stable. She takes a lot of painkillers and is about to hit rock bottom when we meet her. She is living day to day in a drug induced fog.
The descriptive prose of Miranda's mind is so well written, I could feel her agony. The last 100 pages or so lost me and confused me to no end. It was such a well written story, I had to still give it 3.5 stars. This author's descriptive fiction has me itching to pick up another of her books soon!
Thank you to the publisher and author and Netgalley!

Another strange and wonderful creation by Mona Awad! Fans of Shakespeare will enjoy the elements within the plot and readers that enjoy a bit of magical realism will find what they are looking for with this one.

Whew, this book was a wild ride. It’s slow—be warned—but builds pretty artfully and I never felt anything less than entranced. The pace really makes you sit with the agonizing chronic pain the character describes— no rushing or escaping to get through it faster, you’re right there with her through it all. Mona Awad is a master of magical realism that’s totally unhinged but just grounded enough to keep you hooked. This book made me wish I was more of a Shakespeare scholar because it’s clear Awad draws on that to construct her own tragedy and I want to be able to wring this book of all the meaning I can.

Well, this didn't work for me at all.

A one-time theatre professional, Miranda Fitch, is now a college professor and she's close to losing this job. She is addicted to pain-killers for her chronic back pain. She loathes herself, her students, her life.

She has selected Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well - one of his 'problem' plays - for the current production. The majority of the theatre students however were hoping to perform Macbeth and have decided to revolt. The leader of the revolt, the star of this (or any) play ... not because she's so talented, but because her parents make donations to the school ... has called for mom and dad to threaten to pull funding if the play isn't Macbeth.

Everything in Miranda's life seems to be going against her until some unknown supporter steps in and offers a larger donation to the school's theatre program and growth if Miranda can do the show she wants to do. With this surprise, life slowly turns around. Not only does her chronic pain go away and she builds on a thrilling sexual relationship with a friend and colleague, but her student nemesis seems to be taking on Miranda's former issues.

There's an interesting idea here in this book, and I give an 'A' for concept, but author Mona Awad writes the miserable Miranda so well that I took an instant dislike to the character and to the story. Well... I guess it was hard to dislike the story right away because the story didn't really develop until a third of the way in.

Miranda was miserable and very negative about nearly everything. I didn't want to spend time with her, so I didn't want to open the book to read. Sure ... something was bound to happen to her, but I really didn't care. It was a struggle to keep reading through the first half of the book. it gets better, but I don't think it pays off, ultimately.

The first person narrative felt weird. I understood that this was to help get across Miranda's take on the events around her, and it was possibly the best way to express her level of pain and misery, but it came across as a YA angst novel. Really, all she does is tell us about her pain. Again, and again, and again.

If there's a correlation between Awad's story or Miranda's plight, and Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, I don't know what it is. All's Well is not a well-known work (certainly not well known by me) so how it fits with the scheme and theme of the story, I don't.

I was really hoping to like this, and it starts to pull up as it reaches the final pages, but the first half sets a tone that it just can't overcome.

Looking for a good book? All's Well by Mona Awad is a book about a miserable woman, and it never really establishes itself as anything else.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Definitely not appropriate for the audience I teach, but it was an interesting story nonetheless. Mona Awad knows how to write a dark twisty story. Although I need a slightly more likeable… or at least relatable character personally..

All’s Well by Mona Awad is weird, witchy, and wonderful. While it took a little time for me to warm up to Miranda, it was much simpler to hate everyone who stood in her way. As a longstanding Awad fan, I was thrilled to see this book lean into the strange dynamics of theater kids (and theater professionals, in whatever form) that tend to coalesce regardless of their venue. I particularly enjoyed watching Macbeth come to life about 40% of the way through -- the strange magic of this book, curing Miranda and turning her into a swirling beacon of energy until it seems to break her to be so "well," and harnessing that magic back at the students that made her life so difficult during the All's Well production, came together into a satisfying display of karma in Shakespearean proportion.

It was a tough read only because I felt like there was something I wasn’t GETTING the entire time. The writing and style was so unique and kept me intrigued throughout the story, however I did almost quit a few times because the main character was insufferable and so unreliable.

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️(5 stars)

My thoughts: ok… as someone with chronic pain/illness, I have to admit I had some pretty intense feelings about this book. There’s no way for me to explain those feelings without spoilers, so here’s your warning; THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD.

It was frustrating as hell to hear the main character in this book be told almost word for word the same things that I’ve been told. I don’t know if Mona Awad has chronic pain, or she just has some magical insight into the experiences of chronic pain sufferers, but she got it SPOT ON.

And the idea of being able to give away that pain, so that other people understand? Ooh. Tempting. Not sure I’d ever be able to do it, but… tempting.

I loved this book. I loved the main character, for all her flaws. I loved the fantastical premise. A five star read, for sure.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

From the beginning of the book, I struggled with the repetition of the chronic pain and all things encompassing this issue. As someone who suffers from chronic pain and a couple of other chronic illnesses that make my own life not fun, I struggled a bit with the incessant whining about her issues and the lack of attention she receives from the medical community and the gaslighting. I could understand the struggles within the medical community and difficulty receiving any form of effective treatment. I think her attitude and mental health were both dismal and she was blathering in just how horrible it all is without actually attempting to accept, or work through the issue mentally and find ways to move on and find a way to live with them. This is realistic for many in my predicament though so I guess understandable for some. I really wish there would have been more of the fantasy elements in this book. I really loved the three eerie bar guys and would have liked to see them have more of an active role in her improvement. By the end of the book, I really disliked the main character and just thought she became a monster of sorts. She always talked about how mistreated she was, however when the chips were down for others, she also treated them badly and in a way that ignored their realities much like she complained that people did to her. I was really hoping for a redemption story, or the betterment of someone who has had life throw wrenches in place of opportunities. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

I don’t care for books about plays but I wanted to read this because Bunny was a fever dream. This was sort of one too but not as much. A little bit too long and more descriptive than it needed to be. Some of this was funny, a few lines made me laugh. Definitly dark and entertaining at some parts but I didn’t find it particularly amazing. Thank you Netgalley for an advanced copy!

This book is WEIRD but in a good way. I am still deciding whether I "liked it" but the quirky humor and plot points reeled me in. The discussions on female pain and how able-bodied people, sometimes, perceive it were spot on. On that note, I think it should come with a chronic pain TW -- especially in the midst of a pandemic. I hadn't read anything by Mona Awad before but now I am intrigued. This book will be one I keep thinking about.