A brilliant noir comedy about art and illness ... Awad’s characters are deliciously over the top and impossible to forget, as is the author’s gift for morbid humor. The real magic of this novel lies in Awad’s ability to draw the Shakespearean irony out of contemporary tragedy ... Endlessly thought-provoking and not to be missed.
... Miranda is...biting and wonderfully wry, as are many of the narrator’s observations. Miranda Fitch is an acquired taste. She’s wickedly bitter, but she becomes easier to take once you get used to her voice ... I did not anticipate such a nightmarish, hair-raising, diabolically smart treatise on pain—particularly as experienced by women. The type of pain that is real, but invisible (and overlooked, ignored). That much of Miranda’s story is based on Awad’s experience with chronic pain makes this all the more harrowing to read ... Awad...is a master at using language not only to describe, but also to mimic an experience ... For all its cleverness, All’s Well has its frailties. It could be a touch shorter. (Occasionally, explanations of Miranda’s misery—and later, her sudden wellness—belabor the point.) The plot could be a tad tighter. The magical elements occasionally feel a bit muddled. And yet. Once I started to read the book, I just kept going and going. Taking it in this way left me reeling, but when I was finished, I knew one thing for certain: Awad’s writing isn’t merely intoxicating. It’s incandescent.
A stealthily captivating new novel by Mona Awad that, like its namesake, skews more dark than light as it casts its spell ... All’s Well revels in its protagonist’s unlikability ... Even this deft exploration of female suffering gets tiresome ... The Bard is all over this book, salted with Awad’s sharp, dark humor ... In Awad’s assured if trippy tale, everything serves to strengthen the spell.
A daring adaptation ... An inventive horror-comedy full of altered realities and uncanny weirdness ... The result is an omnibus Shakespeare adaptation, simpler than the originals, but resonant with Awad’s own voice ... It’s thrilling the way Awad makes the plays shift, change and blend on the page. Reading the novel is like viewing the world on hallucinogens — or a high dose of painkillers. And if the intrusion of trickster devils into a serious story sounds silly, it is. Awad’s dexterity lies in combining horror with hilarity ... And what a wonderful study of human monstrosity this is. Suffering, it is so often claimed, makes us more compassionate, more human. But, this novel asks, does it really? ... Ultimately, this novel sounds more like an experiment in form than a deeply felt experience of pain. It’s an artful performance, but something fails to make it emotionally resonant.
I found myself in the first half of All’s Well praying for some Eradica to turn down the volume on Miranda’s pity party ... If the author is stage-managing us, she pushes a bit too far. Then she pulls us back. Awad has a penchant for mixing dark humor and dark magic ... I must confess a distaste for the continual onslaught of novels that position a woman as either supernaturally charged or dangerously unhinged, so while Awad’s writing turns as cacklingly weird as I know it can be, I wish she’d embraced Shakespeare’s ethos and just cranked up the witchcraft without any ambiguity ... Ultimately, All’s Well might have landed with more heft if it had abandoned the middle ground of the problem play and worn more boldly the smirking mask of comedy.
This is a darkly funny and strange tale ... shot through with an undeniably sinister vibe, offering up a deluge of painful memory, dark jokes and ever-shifting conflict. It’s an engrossing narrative, one that embraces its more supernatural aspects while also grounding the proceedings in the sad reality of a world in which pain – particularly women’s pain – is dismissed and ignored ... It’s rife with Shakespearean touchpoints, references begetting references; the narrative gleefully pulls from the canon, shaping the story with nods both subtle and overt. It’s a wonderful hat-tip to the darkness that squirms beneath the surface of many of the Bard’s work, with Awad finding ways to seamlessly incorporate these many nuggets of Shakespeariana ... It also works as a satiric takedown of a certain kind of small-school theatre department, one driven by the bizarre confluence of ill-informed administrative demands and cult of personality-type faculty figures. It’s an extrapolation of the sorts of interpersonal conflicts that can spring from being forced to constantly fight not just for funding, but for your very position ... All that, plus we’re given a wonderful underlying darkness regarding Miranda herself, a self-obsessed could-have-been whose entire world revolves around pain, both physical and psychic (and perhaps an overlap of the two); it’s a provocative and disconcerting look at the lengths to which one might go to gain the life that one believes one deserves ... Awad’s prose is knotty and complex, but never at the expense of the story being told. It’s a razor’s edge on which to walk, but she manages to write in a manner that is narratively engaging while also being stylistically evocative. The result is a book that leaves you wanting to make note of certain passages while also being almost too propulsive for you to stop reading long enough to make them.
... a surreal exploration of chronic pain, women's believability and visibility, and desperation that straddles the line between comedy and horror ... Awad's choice to narrate the novel entirely from inside Miranda's head forces the reader to witness that pain in visceral detail, even if no one else does ... It's a claustrophobic perspective, one flooded with staccato, fragmented inner dialogue that reaches for bitter humor but often feels just plain bitter. The style had me impatient for the moment of transformation that I knew was coming, but that doesn't give the reader or Miranda respite until about 100 pages in. The slow pacing, though, reinforces the indictment at the heart of the book — how we fail one another by choosing to look away from pain.
Awad efficiently portrays both Miranda’s confrontation with chronic pain and the slowly evaporating patience of the people in her orbit ... It’s a wild, at times over-the-top ride, but like Shakespeare’s eponymous work, there’s both pathos and humor in this story of how we suffer and the ways in which we’re healed.
The italicized passages not only give a deep view of Miranda’s interior mind, but they also ring true. They demonstrate the sensitive ear—perhaps verging on paranoid but nonetheless acute—that Miranda has for what motivates the remarks characters actually do make ... When this dissolution of reality moves from internal dialogue to actual events, the situation becomes blurry. Readers don’t ever learn if Miranda truly gets away with it, if her vengeance is real or not, and whether she’ll have to pay the piper or else risk a fate worse than her former painful loneliness. Meanwhile, the male characters don’t change much or at all, really ... Whether there is any real resolution to the psychic drama of All’s Well remains unclear ... Perhaps Mona Awad is putting the reader in the position of victim, someone who experiences pain and has no recourse to any real resolution. The setup resembles the writer’s deepest dilemma: what if all her careful plotting, her effort to resolve things for the reader, turns out to be a trick of her imagination, is only in her head?
Awad is particularly deft in describing the hellish nature of pain and the ways those living with chronic pain are often misled, dismissed, or derided ... The novel swings wildly between tragedy and comedy and reality and unreality. Although the novel sometimes struggles under the weight of its own surreality, Awad artfully and acutely explores suffering, artistry, and the limitations of empathy. A strange, dramatic novel where all’s well, or not well, or perhaps both.
The pill-addled theater professor at the center of Awad’s scathing if underwhelming latest is nearing the end of her rope ... Awad’s novel is, like Miranda says about Shakespeare’s All’s Well, 'neither a tragedy nor a comedy, something in between.' Unfortunately, it falls short on both counts: Miranda’s acerbic inner monologue reaches for humor but mostly misses, and the overwrought tone undermines the story’s tragedy ... It’s an ambitious effort, but not one that pays off.
