All's Well

All's Well

Mona Awad

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny, a darkly funny novel about a theater professor suffering chronic pain, who in the process of staging a troubled production of Shakespeare’s most maligned play, suddenly and miraculously recovers. Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers. That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known. With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged...genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.


From the Forum
  • Reading Update from 31% (page 110)

    Having read Bunny by Mona Awad, I came in expecting the wry humor and surrealism we get here (and I thought it really worked in Bunny). My favorite part is the humor so far, but the "figment of the imagination" characters at the bar are grating on me. Not sure why this element worked in Bunny but not All's Well - maybe because this is painkiller-induced psychosis?? As someone who doesn't suffer from chronic pain, I'm impressed with how well Awad gets us into Miranda's mind and body and makes us empathize with her plight. I was worried being in Miranda's head for 350 pages while she suffers would get to be too much, but so far that hasn't proved to be true.

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