Review: All's Well

All's Well by Mona Awad
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


ARC received in exchange for an Honest Review
Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley!

All's Well is the gripping and captivating story of Miranda, a former actress whose life turned upside down after she tragically took a fall out of the stage. Miranda's only involvement with the theater now is reduced to her role as a college theater director. Her life is marked with chronic pain, meds that never take the pain away, professionals who won't look at her, and colleagues who believe she is lying. However, Miranda will not let any of these inconveniences be an obstacle for her to put on All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare, a problem play that means too much for her to be taken away like everything else she has parted from. Maybe a little bit of external help is what she needs in the form of three strange men in a dusky bar. Or maybe the theater heals and pain is a gift.

Mona Awadclearly knows how to write a fascinating novel by balancing what is real and what is not. Actually, I am still not entirely sure of what reality entails in All's Well. Something I enjoyed was that while Miranda feels like a vessel that contains something mystical, I never completely disliked her or wanted her to receive a happy ending either. What Awad accomplishes with her protagonist is a well-rounded individual with obvious flaws but excusable as we are introduced with the amount of pain she carries around.

Other than her main character's descend into madness and the exploration of pain in general, the secondary characters like Ellie were extremely interesting to me even when they were never fully explained. This allows me to imagine whatever I want about them as contributes to the magic.

Now, the overall feeling this novel conveys is Shakesperean - and yes, I know that is not a feeling- but that is how I would describe it. The incorporation of Shakespeare's themes of destiny, fortune, madness, and magic, are made fresh by the natural way they are nurturing the plot without overstating them as Shakesperean, but part of the human condition. I believe the allure the theater has on this story is spot on and the concluding chapters made me feel deliciously dizzy and anxious.

I will gladly go read Bunny and anything else Mona Awad writes, and I will seriously recommend this novel to anyone that wants a 'spellbinding' plot that is never too dark for you to stop, and that even if you wanted, you would not be able to put it down.

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