The Stats
📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚
BOOK: All’s Well
AUTHOR: Mona Awad @misss_read
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Published: August 3, 2021
The Review
✨ The Title/Cover Draw:
- I tried to read Bunny Last year and it wasn’t really my thing. When I found this book releasing later this year, I decided to give Mona Awad another chance. Thanks to @simonandschuster and @netgalley for the opportunity to read this.
💜 What I liked:
- Miranda as a main character is sympathetic through most of the book. Her chronic pain and lack of understanding by doctors (and friends and family) is something that really resonated with me. Many times you feel so frustrated with them you just want to scream “STAND UP FOR YOURSELF!”
😱 What I didn’t like:
- The language is beautiful and poetic, but half the time I wasn’t totally sure what is happening. It’s sort of like a very lucid drug trip where you aren’t totally sure what is real and what is in Miranda’s head.
💁♀️ The Characters:
- In this story we follow Miranda through her job and life. She comes into contact with students while putting on All’s Well, even though the students want to stage a coup and do Macbeth.
🚦 The Ending:
- The ending is very open ended so you can interpret what happens for yourself.
💭 Consider if you like:
- Strange and ambiguous stories or stories where things are just a little unsettling.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Received from Netgalley.
📘 Summary:
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.