**3.5-stars**

Miranda Fitch is a theater professor at a small New England college. Due to chronic pain stemming from the accident that ended her once promising acting career, Miranda isn't currently functioning at the top of her game. Doctors and Physical Therapists have been unable to make any progress with her. It all feels like a sick joke; nothing she tries has helped. Therefore, she takes way more painkillers than she probably should.

As we meet Miranda, she is just about at her rock bottom. The Reader gets a glimpse inside her mind, as she tries to direct her students in this year's production. Although Miranda is hellbent on All's Well That Ends Well, her students want to do the Scottish play. Ha! Can you even imagine? Miranda will not let that happen.

The students are relentless. Worse, they're mutinous and her colleagues, in the faltering Theater Department, are no better. Just when she begins to believe all is lost, Miranda meets three mysterious strangers at her local watering hole who are able to turn the tides of fate. But at what cost?

I really, really enjoyed the first half of this novel. There's no denying how fantastic the writing is. It's cutting, funny, socially relevant, dark and quirky.However, somewhere around 70%, it took a bad turn, from which it never recovered. There are a lot of elements included that generally work for me. It's weird, it's biting, it has a touch of the fantastical, but unfortunately, it just got too confusing. You can have solid weird, without confusing. I just feel like in this case, it missed that mark.

I'm sure there will be a lot of Readers that will get it; I'm just not one of them. During the first half of the story, even when things got a little strange, you could still tell the events that were happening in Miranda's reality; you could tell she was having interactions with her students, with her colleagues, what were memories, musings, thoughts and wishes.

When it got closer to the end, it changed. I couldn't tell what was real. I couldn't tell where Miranda was in time, space, what was happening to her? And it never revealed itself, at least not in my opinion. So, I got to the end and felt like I didn't have a conclusion. Theoretically, I understand the ideas behind what was happening, but I just wanted more closure. I was really disappointed with the last 25%. In it way, it made me feel like I had wasted my time. Never a good feeling. I'm mainly bummed because I expected to enjoy this a lot more than I did. It happens. All's well, I suppose.

I bumped my rating up from 3-stars to 3.5, based solely on the author's creativity and quality of writing. The story for me was a solid 3-stars. It was a good story, but not necessarily my cup of tea.

Thank you so much to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I appreciate the opportunity to share my opinions.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster for providing me with a copy of Mona Awad’s novel, All’s Well, in exchange for an honest review.

Miranda Fitch’s life has been on a downward spiral ever since her promising thespian career was cut short by trauma suffered from a fall off of a stage during a performance. She suffers from chronic pain that no mainstream doctor or alternative form of therapy can cure. Miranda is addicted to pain pills and it doesn’t help that she drinks to excess. Her husband has left her and her job as a drama teacher at a small college is in jeopardy.

Against the wishes of her students, including Briana, a queen bee type who is always given the lead roles due to her rich parent’s donations, Miranda goes forward with mounting a spring production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, rather than MacBeth. All’s Well That Ends Well was the play that ended Miranda’s career, and despite the continued escalation of her misfortunes, Miranda is hell-bent on making it work.

Just when it seems that all is lost and Miranda might have to cave to the wishes of her students, she meets three unusual men in a bar. After a night of heavy drinking, where she isn’t sure what exactly transpired, Miranda is seemingly cured of her ailments. Her boss announces that anonymous benefactors have donated a large sum of money to the theatre department, contingent on Miranda continuing with her production. And in a final bizarre twist, Miranda’s pain seems to have mysteriously transferred to Briana, who is now in such bad shape that the lead role must be recast. Miranda is elated, but in the back of her mind she fears that she might be mixed up in something quite sinister.

I love the theatre and even graduated from a performing arts high school. For these reasons, the premise of Awad’s novel carried a high appeal for me. One of the strongest elements is Miranda’s character voice. She’s punchy and sarcastic with off-beat observations both about herself and the world around her. I laughed out loud many times. The humor is excellent.

It has been a long time since I have read All’s Well That Ends Well and I felt like my lack of memory of the Shakespeare play might have led to me missing out on some of the jokes or other nods. I’m not sure if I actually missed anything, but I wish I had the play fresher in my mind.

Miranda is a highly unreliable narrator, which makes for a fascinating read. I was never sure if she was actually experiencing the events, if it was a dream, or if she was imagining them due to her injuries and/or drugged state. I suspect she had head trauma, in addition to her addition and other pain.

The flip side of this, is it meant that we spent the entire book living her nightmare, and personally, I found it occasionally difficult to keep engaged. I wasn’t very interested in her continued dive into an increasingly odd situation. The story turns eccentric fast. Towards the end, her journey turns into a hellish performance art piece, which made me tune out. I was trying to figure out why I felt this way and I think it’s kind of like when someone tells you about a dream they had and the way the actual dream is nowhere near as intriguing as the reasons behind the dream in the first place. I found the reason for Miranda’s mental decline far more interesting, than witnessing the decline play out.

This said, I would definitely recommend All’s Well. Awad created a unique premise with strong characters. Miranda’s dry humor is really fabulous. All’s Well is a wild ride for theatre and Shakespeare lovers.

I wanted to love All's Well so much after really enjoying Bunny by Mona Awad. Unfortunately, I ended up putting down All's Well after 12% as it lacked dialogue that would normally move the book forward at a quicker pace. I love Awad's decision to highlight an invisible, chronically ill main character, but found the slow pace and lack of initial plot to encourage me to keep reading.

The premise of this book really appealed to me: theatre teacher with chronic pain struggling with life, but I found myself quickly bored by the repetitive discussions of her pain of the play she planned to direct with her students. That being said, the book kept me interested enough that I wanted to see what happened, but I mostly skimmed at about halfway through.

I just don't think this author is for me, but I wish her all the best!

Frankly, I loved Bunny so much there was no way I was going to be anything but disappointed with this book. And then I wasn't at all. I was fully unprepared to love it as much as I do. I mean, the struggles with chronic illness, the feminism - even the Shakespeare - so perfectly fit the niche that is me that it felt like a birthday present. But I've also never read an unlikable, unreliable narrator that is so likable and relatable. Anyway, great book, I loved it. I continue to be a Mona Awad fan!

Thanks to Netgalley!

What’s that you say? A book centered around Shakespeare AND academia? Yes, I WOULD like to know more.

As someone with both a deep and abiding love for the Bard and a personal understanding of the ins and outs of small liberal arts colleges, I was always going to be interested in a book like Mona Awad’s “All’s Well.” However, while that introductory elevator pitch was enough to get me in the door, could it keep me there?

Reader, it most assuredly could. And did.

This is a darkly funny and strange tale, the story of a woman whose professional and personal missteps (both figurative and literal) have left her in a bleak and hopeless place. It’s the story of what can happen when passion curdles into something else, something powered by self-loathing and anger, all of it set against a backdrop of a theatre professor who makes a bargain that she doesn’t understand in a desperate hope to turn around the life she sees slipping away.

Miranda Fitch is locked into a downward spiral. Once an aspiring actress, an on-stage accident leaves her suffering constant pain that no amount of medical assistance can alleviate. She bluffed her way into a position as a professor in a foundering Theatre Studies department at a small liberal arts college, but her ongoing health issues and tendency toward self-medication – not to mention an obsession with the past and what might have been – leaves her teetering on the precipice of disaster.

It doesn’t help that her choice for the department’s annual Shakespeare production – “All’s Well That Ends Well” – is being met by resistance from all corners; the students, the administration and even her fellow faculty members all want a more traditional choice. Specifically, they all want to do “Macbeth,” which only causes Miranda to dig in her heels, even as she’s undermined at all turns.

However, a chance encounter with a mysterious trio of men at a local watering hole changes everything. These strange men seem to know an awful lot about her; they know about her position, her pain and the myriad struggles of her past. A bargain is struck, one whose ramifications are far-reaching.

Suddenly, Miranda’s pain is lessening. Her students have become compliant, if perhaps a little scared. An unexpected donation makes the administration far more willing to allow her to do the show she wants. So many of her problems begin to fade away, leaving her to live a new, more energized life.

But the bill will soon come due … and the price will be far higher than she ever could have anticipated.

“All’s Well” is shot through with an undeniably sinister vibe, offering up a deluge of painful memory, dark jokes and ever-shifting conflict. It’s an engrossing narrative, one that embraces its more supernatural aspects while also grounding the proceedings in the sad reality of a world in which pain – particularly women’s pain – is dismissed and ignored.

It’s rife with Shakespearean touchpoints, references begetting references; the narrative gleefully pulls from the canon, shaping the story with nods both subtle and overt. It’s a wonderful hat-tip to the darkness that squirms beneath the surface of many of the Bard’s work, with Awad finding ways to seamlessly incorporate these many nuggets of Shakespeariana.

It also works as a satiric takedown of a certain kind of small-school theatre department, one driven by the bizarre confluence of ill-informed administrative demands and cult of personality-type faculty figures. It’s an extrapolation of the sorts of interpersonal conflicts that can spring from being forced to constantly fight not just for funding, but for your very position.

All that, plus we’re given a wonderful underlying darkness regarding Miranda herself, a self-obsessed could-have-been whose entire world revolves around pain, both physical and psychic (and perhaps an overlap of the two); it’s a provocative and disconcerting look at the lengths to which one might go to gain the life that one believes one deserves.

Awad’s prose is knotty and complex, but never at the expense of the story being told. It’s a razor’s edge on which to walk, but she manages to write in a manner that is narratively engaging while also being stylistically evocative. The result is a book that leaves you wanting to make note of certain passages while also being almost too propulsive for you to stop reading long enough to make them.

“All’s Well” is in my wheelhouse, of course, bringing together sets and settings that speak deeply to me. However, one doesn’t need to have those same deep-set connections to engage with this book. It is subversive and combative, a work that neither celebrates nor condemns its protagonist, instead choosing to allow the reader to come to their own conclusions. It is funny and sad, packed with the kind of desperation that shines through even in moments of triumph. “All’s Well” ends well, to be sure, but its beginning and middle shine just as brightly, even from the depths of the shadows.

How much of Miranda’s life is real, and how much is her own drug-induced perception of it all? There doesn’t seem to be any way to tell for sure.

What a unique book! Nothing goes right for Miranda, until everything does. Since she’s admittedly drug-addled and spending most of her time in her own head, it’s hard to know how much of her story is real and how much is her fantasy, or even her mind playing tricks. If one could have everything just the way they wanted it, is that really how they’d want it?

Miranda’s interesting observations and perceptions also question the experience of chronic pain, and the way those with pain are treated differently by those who may not understand it the same. Perhaps the most intriguing question Miranda faces, though, is what cost one would be willing to pay for everything they thought they wanted...or what cost would they be willing to have someone else pay?

Overall, this story was definitely open to imagination and interpretation. I’d give it 4 out of 5 stars, but the reader definitely needs to be willing to appreciate an unreliable narrator.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an eARC of this book.

This book was tough for me. It started with an interesting premise of a drama teacher who has chronic pain following an injury several years ago and is trying to understand her current situation. She wants to recreate the role of Helen from All's Well That Ends Well by Shakespeare. but she is still suffering herself and fights the jealousy of youth from her actors as well as the negativity towards her for her ongoing pain.
The plot is interesting but its do odd. There are elements of drama, thriller, magical realism/supernatural vibes. The way that Awad discusses how people, women especially, are treated by colleagues and medical people, when they have chronic conditions. Chronic pain is a difficult condition at best, for the patient as well as medical staff. Women are especially told "its all in their heads". This was my favorite part of the book.
The supernatural elements were good and interesting. At some point though, I felt like some of the dialogue and story became too repetitive and slowly paced. I had times where I considered putting it down. I'm glad I read the whole thing but it wasn't my favorite by her.

#AllsWell #Netgalley #SimonandSchuster

This was really weird. I loved how lyrical her writing was sometimes but I think I'd need another pass at this to really get a feel for what was actually going on. I know her books are supposed to be strange and weird and all that but I found myself skipping paragraphs towards the end there. Very intriguing once you get to the halfway point.

“I used to cry. That was back when I thought tests led to something. A diagnosis that led to a plan, a cure. But tests, I know now, never lead us anywhere. Tests are dark roads with no destination, leading to more dark.”

— Mona Awad, All’s Well
Mona Awad’s newest horror release, All’s Well, is a masterpiece of Shakespearean hyperbolic metaphor.

Miranda Fitch is a twenty-five-year-old theatre professor from Boston, and she’s not entirely sure she’s competent enough to do her job. Even though she doesn’t have a PhD in Theatre—like her judgmental colleague, Grace—she does have ten years of acting experience. Surely it is enough to be entirely responsible for their small New England college’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well?

What further “disqualifies” Miranda from experiencing a normal life is that she lives with excruciating daily chronic pain from a horrific stage injury, resulting in her premature retirement from acting.

Facing a mutiny from her students who would rather put on The Scottish Play, Miranda feels as if she has lost control of virtually everything in her life—her body, her career, and now the future of the theatre department.

One night as Miranda sulks at a local pub, resigned to her misfortune, she is approached by three ominous men who somehow know everything about her. A series of peculiar events transpire and Miranda wakes up the next morning seemingly lifted of her burden of pain. As Miranda—now filled with seemingly unreplenishable energy—lives free from every ache and pain, her student-nemesis Briana has mysteriously fallen extremely sick.

As a fellow chronic-pain sufferer, I felt a deep camaraderie with Miranda, but I also feared her to my very core—and I felt weirdly addicted to this feeling.
Most would call Awad’s particular writing style—as exhibited in her first two published novels 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Bunny—an acquired taste. This could be in part a product of the fact that Awad’s two most recent titles are categorised under Horror on Goodreads. This placement inevitably attracts fans of traditional horror—those expecting similarities to juggernauts such as Stephen King and Peter Straub—who may not be accustomed to Awad’s non-traditional horror. As these more mainstream writers tend to focus on showing readers the horror, creating an atmosphere for the reader to situate their terror, Awad’s stream-of-consciousness horror is grounded inside Miranda’s psyche.

That being said, I loved Awad’s writing style in this novel. I previously read her novel Bunny because it was frequently compared to the classic film Heathers, but it just didn’t work for me. I feel that Awad’s writing style is more effective in All’s Well because it is told from one singular perspective whereas Bunny is told in the third person.

Awad’s stream-of-consciousness narrative takes place entirely inside Miranda’s head which made me feel as if I was almost trapped inside the head of an unreliable narrator. During these instances I was left guessing at what was even happening, which only added to the unsettling atmosphere: “Nothing beats its black wings in me. My heart doesn’t pound. Indeed, the place where my heart is is deliriously open as a field, light as air.”
Notably, Bunny and All’s Well in particular are purely dark humor, which can understandably leave a sour taste in some reader’s mouths. Inside Miranda’s head we have no choice but to laugh along with her at her gruesome suffering. As Miranda spends most of the novel having flashbacks to various incidents in her life as a young woman suffering from “undiagnosable” chronic pain, you begin to wonder if her memories are being embellished as a result of the novel. I couldn’t help but cringe at the all-too-real imagery of her lived trauma. Miranda’s pain was simultaneously terrifying and complete Shakespearean satire, and I didn’t know whether to take delight in her carefree euphoria or recoil in horror.

The best part was how laughably relatable Miranda’s entire existence was for me. More than once Miranda’s flashbacks and medical anecdotes mirrored nearly identical incidents in my disabled life, exact conversations I’d had with medical professionals or friends at one point or another. She embodies the pain and suppression that women who live with chronic pain and debilitating illnesses endure every day.

Miranda and I share not only a Shakespearan-derived name (my middle name) and a connection through our unruly bodies, but also a propensity to completely write off horrific bodily abnormalities and daily persistent pain that “normal” people tend to gasp at.

Internal bleeding?

It’s fine, I don’t have time to go to the hospital.

Miranda, like me, willfully bats her eyelashes at the sight of bone through skin and goes on with her rehearsal unperturbed. Miranda and I both know to hide pain; we both consume vices with discretion to ease the pain, suffering in silence to make it easier on everyone else.

As my mantra is “life is full of minor inconveniences,” Miranda’s own version of the “I’m fine” charade is, copacetically, “All’s well.”

Miranda spoke the language of the chronically suffering, immediately speaking to me as a reader. Whenever Miranda was asked “how’s your pain?” or anything to that effect, I found myself answering with her in her own refrain: “All’s well.” Suppressed and doused with pain, she was never a fictional character as much as she was a real person I could relate to, which I so rarely see represented in the media.

And for that, Miranda, Awad, and All’s Well gets five stars.

Mona Awad is the author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and The New York Public Library, a finalist for the New England Book Award, and currently in development as an AMC series written by Megan Mostyn-Brown. She has published work in The New York Times Magazine, Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She begins teaching fiction fall 2020 in the MFA program at Syracuse. Awad currently lives in Boston.

All's Well is a very entertaining novel. This is the second novel by Mona Awad that I've read. Again, the author plays around with what is reality and what is just the leading character perception. Miranda, is in a very dark state of mind. She suffers from physical pain due to an onstage accident that is keeping her out of the stage so she decides to start teaching theatre at the University. She decides to direct a not so known play by Shakespeare All's Well that Ends Well. But her students are not very enthusiastic about that perspective. Miranda feels that they are trying to sabotage the play and even her teaching /directing job.
A series of very bizarre situation unfolds, and the reader starts to doubt about how reliable is this narrator that seems to be always on the brink of losing her mind. But, how much is Miranda's fantasy and how much is reality? Who is manipulating who in this game of power and revenge?
Again, the book is fun and creepy. I really enjoy Awad's writing. And, in my opinion, the rarefied atmosphere is the main character in All's Well.

I aboslutely LOVED this book!!! I read Mona Awad's debut, Bunny, in the beginning of last year and it was once of my favorite books of 2020. All's Well did not disappoint. I love the way the author can write a character going mad in such a sublte way that you don't realize it's happening until the character is off the deep end. I was a little weary going into it, because I'm not the biggest fan of Shakespeare but that wasn't an issue at all. I was sucked in from page 1 and I never wanted to put this book down. The atmosphere was so well done and I will be thinking about this book for a very long time.

Published by ‎Simon & Schuster on August 3, 2021

The first several chapters of All’s Well made me question my willingness to endure the pathetic protagonist for an entire novel. In later chapters, the protagonist transforms from pathetic to wicked. A wicked protagonist is more interesting than a pathetic protagonist. The more wicked she became, the more I was hooked on the story.

Miranda Fitch is a stage actor — or she was until, while playing the role of Lady Macbeth, she took a tumble off the stage and was hospitalized for back and hip injuries. Miranda regards her finest moment as playing Helen in All’s Well that Ends Well. Miranda sometimes believes she is Helen although, in true Shakespearean tradition, identity confusion becomes a common occurrence as the story unfolds.

No longer capable of performing on stage and barely capable of existing, Miranda takes a job as a theater director at a small college. She fudges her credentials — she’s never actually directed a play — but she leaves much of the day-to-day work to Grace while she lays on the floor, trying to endure her constant pain. When Miranda walks, she drags one leg like an anchor. Her physical therapy sessions only increase her pain. Various doctors and healers have proposed treatments that have no positive impact, leading her mental health provider (and perhaps the reader) to suspect that the pain is all in Miranda’s head. I’m not sure whether Mona Awad wants the reader to believe the pain is real. From Miranda’s perspective, at least, it is real enough, but Miranda’s perceptions are not entirely reliable.

Miranda’s students want to perform Macbeth. Miranda has settled on All’s Well that Ends Well. A young woman named Brianna who always plays the lead by virtue of having wealthy parents who spoil her (and who contribute to the college) leads a rebellion in favor of scrapping All’s Well in favor of the Scottish play. When college administrators pressure Miranda to relent, she goes to a bar to drink her troubles away. There she meets three men who somehow know her name, who know of her desire to direct All’s Well, and who insist that they support her effort because they all “want to see a good show.” Miraculously, when one of them helps her to her feet after another tumble, her pain and disability seem to be receding. Soon she is cured, perhaps better than she ever was.

Are the three men witches? Is Miranda? How about the young woman who takes the role of Helen after Brianna becomes afflicted with the same kind of pain that once troubled Miranda? The novel inspires more questions than it answers. All we know is that people who give Miranda a hard time (including her physical therapist) seem to take on Miranda’s pain and infirmities.

Cause and effect are difficult judge in a novel that adopts the Shakespearean reality of witchcraft. Miranda’s unreliable perception of reality also makes it difficult to know whether the events we read about are only occurring in Miranda’s addled mind. As the novel progresses, her perceptions seem increasingly distant from those of everyone else, including her belief in her own glowing beauty after she comes to rehearsal in a seaweed covered dress, having (she is certain) slept in the sea. She frequently mistakes the ex-con set designer with whom she is sleeping for her ex-husband, although she is the only one who notices a resemblance. Theatrical performances strike her as brilliant that others regard with less enthusiasm. So the reader can’t quite trust Miranda to provide an accurate narrative, but where the truth might lie is never quite clear. Perhaps only the witches know.

All’s Well, like its namesake play, is both a comedy and a tragedy. It is more successful as a comedy. Awad’s dark humor works best when she mocks Briana, a child of privilege whose sense of entitlement encourages her to believe that the dean will believe her when she accuses Miranda of witchcraft. The tragic elements draw upon magic and delusion to transform Miranda into a bad person, or a person who thinks she’s bad, apparently to teach her that it’s better to be good. But Miranda wasn’t a bad person to begin with. At worst, she suffered from a psychosomatic illness that made her a drag to be around. At best, she actually suffered chronic pain that had a physical but undiagnosed cause. The point of Miranda’s delusions is one I could never find.

In addition to the novel's comic moments, I appreciated Awad’s portrayal of Grace as Miranda’s enabler, a false friend who encourages Miranda’s belief in her own pain to undermine her. It is satisfying to watch Grace and Briana take their falls, even if the degree of Grace’s fall is magnified by Miranda’s delusion. Yet by the end, all’s well, and it doesn’t seem that Grace or Briana have learned anything from their experiences. Maybe the experiences only occurred in Miranda’s mind so they had nothing to learn. Who knows?

All’s Well offers a bit of fun for readers who want to catch and interpret allusions to Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespearean themes. Yet Shakespeare made strangeness work — there are allusions here to The Tempest, a brilliantly strange play — while Awad offers a strange blend of magic and delusion that doesn’t always seem to have a point. Still, the story’s energy and humor, its transformation of Miranda from a pathetic character to a wicked one (before she apparently renounces her deal with the devil), and its moments of sharp humor give All’s Well enough good moments to offset the confusion caused by the novel’s ambiguous nature.

RECOMMENDED

An unconventional look at a woman's pain both physical and mental. The main character is a theater professor at a college and is directing a Shakespeare play that her students don't want to do. If I knew the bard better I am sure there are several references I would have caught. Macbeth and threes are prevalent as is a lot of dialogue whispered in pain and dismay. The story kept me reading and relating to women and their maladies being invisible to others. a magic threesome of gentleman change the trajectory of the woman's fate and chaos ensues. The characters are memorable and there is a lesson learned.

copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

Miranda Fitch's life is in shambles. An accident left her in with chronic pain, causing her to lose her growing acting career and her marriage. Painkillers rule her life and her dependence on them has put her career as a college theater at dire risk. The highlight of her life was when she played Helen in a production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, so that's the play she has chosen for this year's production. Her cast is has different ideas, they try to go over her head to instead stage Macbeth. Reminiscent of Macbeth, three strange benefactors step in on Miranda's behalf and change everything for her.

This was a very unique and very weird book, which I enjoyed reading, for the most part. It's told from Miranda's POV and talk about your unreliable narrators. Her perspective ranges from skewed and paranoid to fully delusional. I thought the characterization of Miranda's pain and the associated frustration, was spot on. How can someone prove that they feel pain, and get the proper medical help? The pain can't been seen or proven objectively. I think many women will identify with Miranda's maddening encounters with friends, doctors, physical therapists, even her own spouse. And how alone she felt with her pain, how unseen and ignored. Beyond that, I felt like her delusions as she deteriorated into madness got a bit repetitive. Overall, it was very creative and entertaining. There was plenty of dark humor and there were times when I was laughing out loud. I wish I knew a bit more Shakespeare so I could have followed how this story line paralleled his. I absolutely want to read more of Awad's books and give high marks for the original premise.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

This was every bit as weird and exceptional as I expected, having read Mona Awad’s Bunny prior to this.

Awad’s latest novel isn’t quite as outstanding as her last one, but it’s still strange and wild and thought provoking and hilarious in a manner that I can only describe as subtle snarliness.

If you liked Bunny, you’ll probably like this one as well. It’s technically a campus novel like its predecessor, though the focus is very specifically on one theater production, so it doesn’t employ most of the common tropes of the genre.

I’m not a person with any interest in theater (though I have—somewhat to my own surprise—read a number of very good theater-based novels), and my interest in Shakespeare is purely academic. But I do have one exception to that and it’s the Scottish Play, which is a huge part of this novel.

References to the Scottish Play are present both directly and allegorically, and it makes for a fantastic, eerie head trip through Awad’s weird, weird imagination.

Between All’s Well and Bunny, Mona Awad has become a must-read for me. Her humor and creepy, surreal plots are just exceptional.

What even did I just read?!?! This was so weird, but good? It felt like a fever dream and was aggressively sad, funny, emotional, confusing, uncomfortable, and and and…

This is certainly not for everyone but if you enjoy a little oddness and surrealism and just sort of buckle up and go with it - maybe just maybe it’s for you.

This book is a great look at the arts. The characters are rich and varied and very funny. A notable follow up to Bunny! Loved it.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Last year I read Bunny by Awad. It was wild, weird and such a great read. When I saw All's Well I couldn't wait to read it. The novel delivered in all the ways I could hope for. It was weird. It was confusing. It was real. By the end my thoughts were... WTF did I just read? Exactly, how I felt about Bunny. Can't wait to see what Awad has next.

Rating: 3.5
This isn't the usual kind of thriller that I like. But, from what I heard about "Bunny" by this author, it is what I expected. So I knew what I was getting into. As angry as I felt for the main character when people wouldn't take her pain seriously, I was also annoyed at the character throughout a lot of the book. I think that's the intention though. I didn't hate this book, but it also wasn't for me. I still want to read Bunny,, though.. I recommend this if you like thrillers with magical elements.