I've enjoyed Awad's work in the past but this one was a miss for me sadly. I found it unnecessarily long and didn't love the story. I think it was good to have some representation for those with chronic illness.

When Miranda Fitch's acting career and marriage both came to a crashing end following an onstage accident, she took up the role of director and professor of a college theatre program. She is now set on putting on a production of All's Well That Ends Well but her students would much rather sink their teeth into Macbeth. When three mysterious strangers enter Miranda's life, they seem to know a lot about her past and her future and sure enough, Miranda's luck appears to be about to turn.

I enjoyed the disorienting, hazy atmosphere that haunted this novel throughout and I was really intrigued to find out the truth of what was happening to both Miranda's miraculous recovery and Briana's strange affliction. I think my issues were with Miranda's likeability and therefore, my investment in her coming out on top. I was really confused as to what was reality and what was her drug-addled brain but perhaps that was intentional.

I definitely preferred the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that came with Bunny, which was missing from All's Well. There was none of the dark humour that Bunny had and in comparison, it was a very serious book. I'm not sure All's Well can really be classed as horror and would say that it is much more akin to what I understand to be magical realism. However, it's not clear whether there is actually any magic in it at all, so perhaps it's actually more of a contemporary with a very unreliable protagonist.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC to review. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. As an avid reader of Shakespeare, and an English Literature student, it was right up my street. After Bunny, I was nervous what might be in store for this book, but it did not disappoint.

I found the beginning really interesting and I was eager to read on. I liked how vivid the author described the pain the main character was experiencing and how it was wearing her down. The further I got into the novel, it started to lose my interest a bit. I like things with a little magical realism thrown in, so this was fun even though sometimes I was a little confused.

Awad is a talented writer and makes her character and their feelings really vivid. This one worked for me to a certain extent, but I am interested in reading more from the author.

This is a fascinating novel that I picked up because I’m a chronic pain patient and I was interested in the perspective of the main character. I got way more than I bargained for! I sometimes found in painful to be in Miranda’s head, it made me think about how narcissistic my pain had made me and what sort of friend/partner I’d become. I did recognise the darkly comic thread that ran through her narration. A lot of my friends are disabled and my partner who’s able-bodied found it a struggle to accept our humour at first because it’s very dark and may seem cruel to anyone without a disability. There’s a terrible paralysis to being in pain all day, it takes away the ability to plan and make goals. I think Awad captured this in how trapped Miranda seems, like wading through treacle. There were interesting allusions to the Bible in the names of the men who surround and are supposed to support her, Matthew Mark Luke and John. There’s even a Paul - an allusion I’m very opposed to on sight thanks to St Paul’s misogyny in the Bible. They’re all rather judgemental and whether the author was alluding to the research that suggests women in chronic pain are less likely to be taken seriously by the medical profession.
Then there were Shakespeare references, Macbeth mostly and another to the story of Dr Faustus - both are stories of persuasion and temptation. This became a fascinating whirl of allusions, horror and the supernatural.. I started to lose my way a bit here and became confused. I let it wash over me but I’m sure there were things I wasn’t fully taking in. I’m sure I missed a lot, but I enjoyed Miranda’s character and I applaud the playfulness and genre bending.

or Nothing's Well

Told by an unattractive narrator who so totally craves for attention and not just any attention. She has in fact to be centre stage always.

She uses her pain as her prop and then her good health as a prop. All the things that happen are props so that she can be at the centre even the people around her are reflectors so that she can shine better.

The first part were pain was the main protagonist was hard to read. We have a difficult relationship to pain. It is unwelcome by all and we hate when we have it and feel very uncomfortable when others have it. We try to help and want those in pain to get over it as soon as possible. It is hard for us to see others in chronic pain without being able to help. We get afraid and even start blaming the person in pain. This might be a misjudgement or not because unfortunately some people do use their pain as a prop, as a reason for being what they are. It's difficult to see the truth because we feel bad for thinking badly about those in pain.

After the first third of the book we see fantastical things happen and explore there results.


A much appreciated ARC provided by author/publisher via Netgalley.

Unfortunately I didn't find myself clicking with this story, and that's almost entirely due to my own personal tastes. Although I loved Bunny by Mona Awad, I found All's Well to be a bit too slow for me, with a strangeness to it that didn't quite gel with the narrative. At times I found the writing to be a little over done, and the magical realism aspects just left me confused. I'm such a logical minded person, that I need explanations for things and All's Well just left me feel a bit lost.

The chronic pain representation was exceptional however. Miranda's experience is reminiscent of so many who suffer in silence with undiagnosed pain, especially women, and her anguish and depression, her will to just want everything to end, felt incredibly realistic and believable. As such, I found Miranda to be a great and well developed character. However, everyone else fades into the background. From her coworkers, to her students, there's just no substance to them.

Mona Awad is such a talented writer, able to make the mundane into the weird and wonderful and never fails to take me by surprise. But I don't think this quite paid off for me the way Bunny did.

All's Well is about Miranda, once a rising star now a theatre professor, that suffers with chronic pain after sustaining an injury on stage. Awad creates stunning visuals with her prose, unfaltering tension in this fantastic Shakespeare retelling whilst talking about the theme of women's pain not being believed. I love a book that reads like a fever dream and Mona Awad is the queen of weird books. All my favourite booky buzzwords come to mind - dark, captivating, strange, uncomfortable. An auto buy author now for sure! Thanks Simon & Schuster for sending me a copy to review.

3.5 stars
Miranda Fitch is a college professor with chronic pain that started when she fell off a stage that she was acting on. When she decides that the play the students will act is All's Well That End's Well it sets off a chain of events that seem fantastical.

The novel got a little strange and fantastical which I did enjoy; the story line of Miranda's chronic pain which is either ignored or minimised by both health professionals and her friend was eye opening. I enjoyed the novel but didn't feel that it was an easy read.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review

After reading Bunny and absolutely hating it I didn't think I'd ever read another Mona Awad book, but here we are. This one was very different and much easier to follow although there was still a lot of strange stuff going on. I liked the mix of Shakespeare and the commentary on chronic pain. As a person suffering from a chronic disease I'm always interested to see how pain and illness are portrayed. It was ok in the end. I didn't love it but didn't hate it.

I chose to read this book having enjoyed the author's previous book Bunny. All's Well was very different although equally compelling.

Reading the novel was like reading a review of a Shakespeare play through a haze of pain medication. There are some recognisable bits and some things that seem bizarre or magical, but it's all a bit of a daydream. Interesting theme of chronic pain though: this is an important issue that rarely features in fiction.

Recommended for those who like their fiction to be a little offbeat, complex and hallucinatory.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

4.25 stars

"I need to perform my little bit of pain for you so you'll know I'm human?"

"Miranda, I didn't mean—"

"But not too much pain, am I right? Not too much, never too much. If it was too much, you wouldn't know what to do with me, would you? Too much would make you uncomfortable. Bored. My crying would leave a bad taste. That would just be bad theater, wouldn't it? A bad show."

--
This was an utterly compelling, completely all-encompassing read. I felt pulled in from the very first chapter, and it felt like I held my breath all the way through its twists and turns until I resurfaced, gasping for air, after the chilling denouement.

Our protagonist, Miranda, is a drama teacher struggling with chronic pain who is trying to win over her students to perform 'All's Well,' rather than their preferred 'Macbeth.' Her desperation to combat the betrayal from both her theatre troupe and her own body leads her to making a deal, of sorts, with the devil, of sorts, that begins her upward/downward spiral into embodying the phrase 'All's Well' in all its conflicting, contradictory glory.

Awad's unflinching portrayal of chronic illness is one that felt so close to the bone to be uncomfortable, which was of course its intended effect. The ethereal, visceral imagining of Miranda's internal world was a seeringly honest character portrait that will stay with me long after closing the final page, and as a fan of Shakespeare's works, I appreciated how deftly their references were woven in to the story.

There were moments that I found trickier - some sections of Miranda's journey felt slightly repetitive and stagnant, and whilst I appreciated the ambiguous ending in one sense, I felt that a narrative so sharp and incisive could have benefitted from something a bit more abrupt and final. However, these are minor comments compared to my overall enjoyment of the story, which I would definitely recommend.

This novel is so strange and challenging, but might just be a masterpiece. I feel like I've been on a very strange trip - I'm not quite sure what was real, what actually happened and what may have just been the delusions of an unreliable narrator, but it seems like I have witnessed magic. This will definitely not be a read for everyone, but I loved it. Weaving together Shakespeare, and a little bit of Faust, while also being an indictment on the way medical professionals deal with chronic, unexplained pain (particularly women's pain) and also featuring a main character who is tough to spend time with, All's Well is a triumph.

My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This started off so well but i feel like this book had consistent issues with tone and pacing. I found it to be a little too bleak and Miranda was not a great character to follow even though she was written as the typical unreliable narrator. I don't think it worked for this book and it just made the book kind of a slog to read. I think i would read another book by Mona Awad as this had promise but i don't think this was the right book for me even though there was so many elements that i normally do like.

Great style of writing and world building but, even if it was potentially a perfect match, it didn't worked and I was bored.
I think it could be my mood or the main character who's quite depressing.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

On the one hand, I think that this book does appealing things w the concept of pain: it literalises the desire to have your pain seen and understood and believed, it plays out the half-desperate, half-vengeful urge to make someone that doubts you feel what you feel, it imagines forcing the impassive paternalism of the medical establishment to crack. Those are familiar and emotionally crunchy fantasies, And even though there is very little subtlety in the execution & its resolution is so on-the-nose it feels trite, a narrative that makes those fantasies its central tension is inherently compelling to me.

On the other hand, I found the style and structure very reminiscent of 'Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall' in ways I didn't like. Awad indulges Miranda's internal voice, and all its repetitions, self-importance, idiosyncrasies, to a point that slows scenes and stalls the sense of growing dread. It felt to me much longer than three hundred and fifty odd pages, because so many of the scenes, so many of Miranda's observations, go on just a few minutes too long to be punchy, or funny, or sinister.

This book read much like a fever dream or waking hallucinations. At some points, it was hard to sort out what was real and what wasn’t, but that felt like a reflection of the main character’s state of mind, which I thought was well done. The book is subtly eerie, strange, and at some points even comical.

I wanted to read this book because I, like the main character of the novel, suffer from chronic pain. However, I stopped reading this after 10% because I found the main character's voice so grating. Perhaps in some ways the themes of the book hit too close to home for me, but it seemed as though the author was almost making fun of those of us who experience chronic pain by making the main character so unpleasant and unreasonable. Maybe this would have changed as the narrative developed, but this simply wasn't the right book for me.

All’s Well was a wonderfully weird book that completely captured me. It may have been my first Awad book, but I know I will pick up more of her work.

I was initially drawn to that intriguing promise, blending some dark academia with a supernatural twist and a psychological hellride. Awad delivers all of this and so much more. This is a very, very clever book that plays with those little doubts in your head. The entire headspace of Miranda is a darkly comic, bleak and horrifically suffocating space to inhabit. Awad ensures that you are just as caught up in her misery and struggles, leading to a richly nuanced and painfully honest depiction of chronic pain. You feel as bogged down as Miranda in everything, so when a glimpse of hope appears, you follow the rabbit all the way down.

I really loved the way Awad explored the traditional temptation narrative. The meta touch of the play within a play felt inspired, as did all of the Macbeth references due to it being the choice preferred by the students. I can only describe the plot as something akin to a mixture of Macbeth and Doctor Faustus, with its hellish landscape and superbly executed touches of horror. There’s also threads of magic and something more beneath the surface. Awad leaves everything through a foggy haze, with plenty of ambiguity and things left unsaid. Narratively, this is a bizarre and confusing book that offers itself up to the reader to untangle and interpret as they wish. I love that ability to go back through and just tear through the story, adding together your own inferences and implications. It makes the story that much richer and tempting to sink your teeth into.

All’s Well was one hell of a wild ride, with its trippy, dark aesthetic probing the realities of living with a chronic condition and a treacherous tale of temptation.

3.5 rounded down

I can see how Mona Awad's novels might be divisive, but her novels are nothing if not refreshing. I described her last novel, Bunny, as "weirdly compelling" and "unique", and I'd say the same goes for her latest offering, All's Well. It's hard to exactly put my finger on it but she's bringing something new - and disquieting - to the table for sure.

With both books portraying 'difficult women', or perhaps more accurately women who feel somehow isolated or adrift from where they feel they should perhaps be or are expected to slot in to society, All's Well tells the story of Miranda, a woman addicted to painkillers and suffering from chronic pain after an accident during her former acting career. She gets a job at a college and chooses the play All's Well That Ends Well to be her first play as the new theatre director. But the students hate the play (and want instead to put on Romeo and Juliet) and become mutinous... but that's where things start to get really interesting.

I'll leave the plot summary there, but I'd venture that this is in many ways (tone, themes) similar to Bunny, and I think readers of that novel would enjoy this one too. It lost its way a tiny bit towards the end - with one scene going on a bit too long for my liking - but overall this a solid follow-up to Bunny, well-written and an enjoyable novel of the denial (or even dismissal) of female pain and desire.