Mona Awad

"ALL'S WELL is about Miranda Fitch whose life is a waking nightmare after an accident ruins her acting career, and leaves her with chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers and alcohol. On the verge of losing her job as a college theater director, Miranda lives out her broken dreams through an upcoming production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, when the unimaginable happens. She suddenly recovers, but at what cost?"--

A Novel

All's Well

Elizabeth Denny

“Dear Readers: This is one wild book! . . . No holds barred.” —Margaret Atwood via Twitter “Mind-blowing. Equal parts brilliant and hilarious.” —Heather O’Neill, bestselling author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Lullabies for Little Criminals From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny, a darkly funny novel about a theatre 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 pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theatre 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 hell-bent 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 via Twitter 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.

Monica Cope

I am moving faster than I thought myself capable.

Waiting for her to resume a more human shape.

This book captivated me and I was very excited to see where it was going. I felt like my brain was jumbled and racing like the protagonists. However I did not care for the ending. It felt unfinished and underdeveloped. 

Nicole Neuman

this book was a fever dream in the best way omg...

After finishing Bunny and being left with all the WTF feelings, most normal people probably would have held off before jumping into another Mona Awad book. For me (a Shakespeare nerd and lover of women being unhinged and a little evil), however, going to All's Well next was a no brainer and I am so glad I did. This book is not only Shakespearean, but it's raw and rooted deep in the misogynistic treatment of women with chronic illnesses and pain. Awad pulls us through this narrative in such a masterful way, allowing for space to empathize and relate to Miranda, but also for us to grow frustrated and a little afraid of and for her. While All's Well That Ends Well is the play they put on, because of Miranda's personal connection to it, the haunting ploy for power that Macbeth always brings to the table is tightly interwoven with Miranda's life and the cast of their production of All's Well. This book, like Bunny, will force you to sit with being uncomfortable and confused, and for me, that's where the fantastic spark of Awad's writing lies. Similarly to Macbeth, this book begs a question: how far are you willing to go for power? And then: what are you willing to do or give up to keep it? I could get into the whole interplay between Macbeth and All's Well that Awad draws out here, complete with amazing references and aspects that could easily make this a retelling of either or both plays depending on how you define retellings, but that's an essay for another time. This is just brilliant, I love this book, I love Mona Awad's writing, and I love playing with Shakespeare. 

this book was a fever dream in the best way omg...

After finishing Bunny and being left with all the WTF feelings, most normal people probably would have held off before jumping into another Mona Awad book. For me (a Shakespeare nerd and lover of women being unhinged and a little evil), however, going to All's Well next was a no brainer and I am so glad I did. This book is not only Shakespearean, but it's raw and rooted deep in the misogynistic treatment of women with chronic illnesses and pain. Awad pulls us through this narrative in such a masterful way, allowing for space to empathize and relate to Miranda, but also for us to grow frustrated and a little afraid of and for her. While All's Well That Ends Well is the play they put on, because of Miranda's personal connection to it, the haunting ploy for power that Macbeth always brings to the table is tightly interwoven with Miranda's life and the cast of their production of All's Well. This book, like Bunny, will force you to sit with being uncomfortable and confused, and for me, that's where the fantastic spark of Awad's writing lies. Similarly to Macbeth, this book begs a question: how far are you willing to go for power? And then: what are you willing to do or give up to keep it? I could get into the whole interplay between Macbeth and All's Well that Awad draws out here, complete with amazing references and aspects that could easily make this a retelling of either or both plays depending on how you define retellings, but that's an essay for another time. This is just brilliant, I love this book, I love Mona Awad's writing, and I love playing with Shakespeare. 

Maya 

Alls well that ends well!

This was such a fun read. Mona Awad just knows how to keep me entertained!

neen

and this is why God said: "let there be no more Shakespeare adaptations"

noor

tori 👻

katrina montgomery

"A dazzling wild ride of a novel - daring, fresh, entertaining, and magical. Mona Awad is a powerful and poetic storyteller, telling us something new and profound here about the connection between suffering and elation. When I was away from this book, I longed to get back to it." -- George Saunders, New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo "Wild and exhilarating and so fresh it takes your breath away, All's Well is an utterly delicious novel of pain and vitality, Shakespeare and the uncanny, and our own subtle moral failures when we brush up against the pain of others. Mona Awad's talent is so vital that it absolutely roars out of her. " -- Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies "Tragic, macabre, and wicked. I laughed out loud the whole way through. One of the funniest books I've read in years." -- Heather O'Neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel 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.

Isabella 

mona awad is great at making me feel very confused but also very entertained.

This book shined in its prose. Awad is a master at using words to invoke the sense of an unreliable narrators mental state, and Ms. Fitch’s inner monologue about her struggle with healthcare workers in relation to her chronic pain are interesting glimpses into the lives of people who deal with such things daily. I feel as though the metaphors went just a bit over my head, perhaps because I’m unfamiliar with Shakespeare. I love how she writes, the story just fell a bit flat because I didn’t ‘get’ the how of it.

Emily McMeans

once again miss mona awad has managed to fill me with dread and an inability to turn away. at one point i realized i was reading a wall of text stream of consciousness and yet it moved through me so seamlessly i couldn't be mad at it. my only gripe is wishing it had stuck the landing a bit more - but what a journey

tiff <3

Amanda Autumn Berrey

love a shakespeare moment, a really interesting take on chronic pain and the woman’s experience in medical settings

Clara Gauthier

Lucy

My heart ached for Miranda in this story. She suffers from an excruciating pain that noone else can see. Her friends are annoyed by it, her doctors are not in any way helpful. The theatre department at her school is on it's last legs, and the students that make up the cast of the play she is directing absolutely suck. All's Well is a frustrating read, but only because Miranda's pain and frustration jump off the page.


Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with the free ARC copy of this book. This is my honest review.

im like in shock and confusion and I feel like someone is gonna hex me or already did 

Ruby Emmeline Fisher

Alexa M

"I am hypnotized by my own ruin." 

ok WOW. i enjoyed this sooo much more than i ever thought i would. Mona's writing is like no other, good god. i was pretty lost in the first 50 pages of this book and was thinking the writing was almost  too  beautiful, but that was pretty quickly righted. the pacing of this was addicting, once i was in it i could not put it down. Miranda was so perfectly unlikeable and i loved reading from her. tbh, the last 50ish pages were quite muddled but i think i liked the open-ended way this wrapped up! this is probably my favorite Mona Awad.

dija

Shakespear lied All's not, in fact, well.

"A dazzling wild ride of a novel – daring, fresh, entertaining, and magical. Mona Awad is a powerful and poetic storyteller, telling us something new and profound here about the connection between suffering and elation. When I was away from this book, I longed to get back to it." — George Saunders, New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo "Wild and exhilarating and so fresh it takes your breath away, All's Well is an utterly delicious novel of pain and vitality, Shakespeare and the uncanny, and our own subtle moral failures when we brush up against the pain of others. Mona Awad's talent is so vital that it absolutely roars out of her. " — Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies "Tragic, macabre, and wicked. I laughed out loud the whole way through. One of the funniest books I’ve read in years." — Heather O'Neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel 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.

Het duurde lang voor mijn gevoel voordat er een plot kwam. Voor de rest heel meeslepend en mooi geschreven. Einde vond ik helaas niet zo leuk.

Silvie van der struik

tina

i love how mona awad’s books make me feel very confused very disturbed and kinda like im on drugs. it’s very fun !!

Amani Zaha

Listen, I think I may have found another favourite author.

All's well is about college theatre professor Miranda, whose existence is defined by her chronic pain. Every movement is a chore, a fight against her body's refusal to cooperate. Her countless visits to professionals and tubs of pills do nothing to sort out the invisible web of pain she carries, and she's left with no choice but to drag herself through everyday life.

You feel this burden as a reader because Mona Awad is so good at making her characters' experiences feel real and tangible. I could feel the heaviness of Miranda's chronic pain, her frustration when her students become mutinous because they don't agree with her choice of play; her resignation to all of it.


I lie like this, and I do not feel relief. Left hip down to the knee still on vague fire. A fist in my mid-back that won’t unclench. Right leg is concrete all the way to my foot, which, even though it’s in the air, is still screaming as if crushed by some terrible weight. I picture the leg of a chair pressing onto my foot. A chair being sat on by a very fat man.


Another reason I loved this: the story is dark magical realism, first subtle, then obvious. Also, the further we get, things start to become increasingly surreal, and Miranda's narration grows hysterical, her behaviour nearing unhinged as the plot builds to its climax. It's an unsettling fever dream that you're trapped in.

I became so engrossed in what was happening that I could not put down the book until I'd finished it. A part of me grew to dislike Miranda's character as the story progressed, but in a this-speaks-to-the-quality-of-the-writing way. She's a compelling character, and even though I would've liked some more depth to characters like Grace (if you've read Bunny, she is in several ways this book's equivalent to Ava), it's nothing that affects the story too much, I think.

Anyway. The ending seemed to be missing a little something, but overall, this book deserves five stars.

Jasmine

“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!

have i ever been so confused? no.
i don't even remember swinging like a pendulum in my opinions of the main character.

this book was so dreamlike and surreal i loved it.

Michelle García

It had a really interesting idea! I was quite entertaining and the fact that we get like a non-conclusive ending, like up in the air really did it for me. I just would have liked a little more drama (it's theater!) But still, not bad!

Fraser Simons

As gloriously unhinged and wild as Bunny is. There’s a quality imbued in the voice Awad creates for her characters that feel almost like Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness mixed with her letters. Where it’s just this is both how I think, a high degree of verisimilitude, and there’s no censor whatsoever. Coupled with very dynamic scene cuts and frenetic meter, there really just isn’t anything like this or Bunny (the only two books I’ve read of Awads’ work). 

This feels like it hits so fine a point regarding societal expectations placed on women; the internalized disassociation of humanity from empathy, especially from those who particularly would benefit from it; the ways in which those with chronic pain are erased and stymied and actively misbelieved. Especially the latter. I have friends with fibromyalgia and the years of undiagnosed bullshit they went through from doctors who claimed it was all psychosomatic or “just stress” is actually astounding.

This book, to me, who knows nothing of the play this parodies and parallels, All’s Well That Ends Well, felt like this book was all about exploring inverted power dynamics as much as the higher societal concerns mentioned above. At a base, human level Miranda, the main character is simply not able to get what she needs from people and is not seen as someone of value whatsoever, all due to her pain. Though this is all heavily from Miranda’s perspective, which shifts from very close psychic distance to something completely dissociative at apt and telling times, I think that this perspective lens itself well to a commonality any reader will experience, simply because everyone, at some point or another, has probably felt like a burden before. And yet very few have also had the additional component of a disability of some kind. 

While writing about alienation the reader is able to surmount the internalized societal standards of able-bodied, hyper-sexualized, women who lack agency in their lives due to these projections. 

It then also counters this with the simultaneous empowerment and surprising lack of agency the opposite would have, which I thought was quite interesting. Heroine and villainous in one. And eminently relatable due to the structure. 

Where this faltered a bit for me was the beginning. Awad keeps you coming with her unique prose—something that, I think, will either click with you or it won’t—but you really do feel Miranda’s pain. It is actually difficult to empathize with her at the start. And we know why. But the book does such a good job of casting the reader as a judgemental critic that it can be a bit of a slog. 

The wild thing is that when it’s inverted you’re right there with the characters, reappraising Miranda in terms of patriarchal standards. Even when she’s empowered and villainous it’s also horrific, and that’s the beauty of this text, in my opinion..

Will everyone struggle through the around 25% to get there? I’m not sure. The nice thing is that for the people who have issues with the first portion, I can say that probably the book is About exactly said issues. Judge it by the whole story and all that. But who hasn’t put things aside? This is why, I think possibly like Bunny, this really depends if you click with Awad’s voice or not. 

I have a feeling as thematically robust as this book was for me, I think I missed some things simply by now being familiar with the play it references and not really knowing plays, in the same way knowing MFA’s and being a huge literary nerd really helped me appreciate Bunny. I’m somewhat in the dark regarding the metaphor, allegory situation when it comes to Miranda and Helen, plays and productions, in general, and theatre “stuff” in general. 

Even still, I adore this book.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC. I was very excited to be approved for this one.

Miranda is a theatre professor whose life is less than satisfactory. After falling during a performance early in her acting career, she finds herself in constant, seemingly incurable pain and struggles to even sit still. One night, as she's drowning her sorrows at the local pub, her path takes a sharp turn. After drinking a glowing, golden liquid, she wakes up the next morning with no memory of the night before, and her chronic pain has lifted. But as a lover of the Bard, Miranda should know that sudden streaks of luck always come at a price. Author of "Bunny." Hometown: Montreal, QC.

Rita Wang

3.5/5

I always think Mona Awad's books benefit from a second read since they are always so packed with nuance, texture, and theme. In this case, I don't feel like I have enough knowledge on Shakespeare to really understand the depth and weight of the text. I really want to revisit this at a different time when I'm a bit more educated or worldly, if that makes sense.

Thematically, I appreciated the discussion on being stuck in the past and the ideas of projection. I think Miranda is a really compelling character and her character arc is the whole point of the book (as I've seen reviews saying she's unlikeable in a bad way) and to me is what makes her journey that much more relatable. We've all felt pain and thought dark thoughts about other people, and we've all tried to find ways of coping with our pain, including trying to drag other people down with us. 

I don't know if perhaps if I'm just dense or uneducated, but I feel like there's a lot about this book that I'm missing and just isn't connecting for me but I hope returning to this at a later time will pull back the curtain for me.

All's Well A Novel

Reviews

Highlights