All's Well

All's Well by Mona Awad is a wonderfully bizarre, mysterious, magical, and horrifying novel from the author of Bunny exploring topics of chronic pain and theatre. Miranda is a theatre professor who lives with chronic pain in her leg and hip. Doctors and therapists either don't believe her or offer unhelpful advice. Her colleagues don't believe her, or have grown fatigued with caring. Her acting career derailed, now teaching in a small and underfunded theatre studies program, Miranda is fighting to direct her chosen play this semester, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well...but everything changes when she meets three mysterious strangers. With frequent references to both All's Well and Macbeth, Awad weaves a story about pain, healing, temptation, magic, sacrifice, and mystery. Though at times esoteric, Awad presents both illusion and reality, reflecting the truth in artifice experienced in the theatre, as Miranda finds herself in a Shakespeare-esque “problem play” in her own life. This novel asks the reader to consider what they would do to heal themselves, and also perhaps to consider if happy endings are possible? As an actor and director I really enjoyed all the theatre references throughout the book. I also appreciated the hallucinatory vertigo Awad created for the reader as the novel progressed. In some ways I found this book less esoteric than Bunny, but still definitely in the same mind-bending style. I would recommend this book to fans of Shakespeare, fans of Bunny, and anyone who's interested in genre-defying speculative fiction about chronic pain.