Reviews with content warning for Body horror - All's Well

Reviews tagging 'Body horror'

All's Well by Mona Awad

23 reviews

erilynne's review against another edition

3.75

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Weird and hard to put down, as I have come to expect from Awad. I enjoy Awad’s writing style and stories, but Rouge is still my favorite. Most characters were difficult to like. I can appreciate the focus on unseen female pain, but wish some parts of the story were more fleshed out than leaving it to the reader to piece together.

Content Warnings

soggymcflurry's review against another edition

4.75

challenging dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This authors writing style is very interesting and addicting. This book was slow and difficult to read at times. The parts of the book that are real representations of life are depressing and challenging. The parts that are creative and mysterious are disturbing enough to make you read on. There’s a lot to unpack and think about.

Miranda’s descent includes a lot of stuff I didn’t care much about and struggled to connect to the story, and the end of the book was confusing at first. But overall a great read, especially for the chronically ill, the women filled with anger, people who have a small piece of them who desire revenge for the way the world has treated them, or fellow theater nerds.

Content Warnings

ashleycmms's review against another edition

4.0

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: N/A

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

asher_james's review against another edition

4.0

challenging dark medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

lurieta's review against another edition

4.75

challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This surreal novel tells the story of Miranda, a college theater director in Boston who lives with extremely debilitating chronic pain after a fall off a theater stage shattered her burgeoning acting career and caused her to have to undergo surgery on her hip and physical therapy, among other treatments that aren't working. She is doing battle with her body and her students and co-director about their Spring play, which Miranda wants to be Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well." One night, Miranda goes after rehearsal to her and her colleague Grace's favorite dive bar, contemplating ending her life, when she meets three mysterious men who give her a drink, the golden remedy, which gives her the power to seek vengeance by inadvertently transferring her pain to those who have wronged her. As Miranda's health improves, the people she made sick (her nemesis student, her physical therapist), things are finally going her way, but at what cost? I really loved this weird novel for it's depiction of navigating how people treat you when you have chronic pain and how much we take our health for granted.

Content Warnings

hauntedantiqueshop's review against another edition

3.75

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Hmm. Odd. But I don’t know enough about All’s Well That Ends Well to dispute this. I will say that I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing style. Lots of repetition and also no one says another persons name that often when speaking to them?? “Hello, Miranda! Miranda, are you okay, Miranda? That’s so weird, Miranda. You’re limping, Miranda.” SHUT UP??

Content Warnings

ellen_is_reading's review against another edition

4.0

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

moxiereads's review against another edition

4.5

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

amayakodi's review against another edition

4.25

dark emotional funny mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

"sometimes we wish or terrible things, things we deserve. how could we not wish for them when we deserve them? and sometimes the heavens hear us. something hears us. and our wishes come true. should we feel guilty? of course we shouldn't feel guilty, why guilty? why guilty when we deserve it, when maybe, just maybe it's a question of justice?"

medical misogyny will make you so much of a shell that vindication consumes you whole and you will do everything in your power to make them rue the day. pain must be performed to be taken seriously, but simultaneously, they will accuse you of overperformance, of putting on too much of a show.

ending is ambiguous, but i think it deserves to be as such. it would not be a problem play without it. on the topic of problem plays, i think deeply about the representation of disability media, in which disabled peoples are relegated to tragic storylines for able bodied characters or as comic relief characters in which viewers are meant to laugh at their pain. forced into the binary of tragedy or comedy, awad asks us (through the conceit of the problem play) to criticize what we see and know of disabled peoples; that maybe, able bodied people need to get the fuck off the stage for once!

Content Warnings

chrstnlvly's review against another edition

3.5

dark tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Although All's Well is classified as horror, similar to Bunny, but it could be more appropriately categorized under magical realism (or perhaps surrealism), just like Bunny.

This book confirmed my suspicion that Mona Awad will be an auto-buy author for me. Awad has indeed made it to my list of favorite authors because I have an affinity for the peculiar.

Articulating my thoughts on Awad's books is always a challenge, despite the excellence of her prose and storytelling. Rating All's Well was difficult as I found the ending slightly underwhelming. I sought more rage and a more unhinged narrative.

While I rate Bunny higher (I wish I could read that book for the first time again), All's Well is still a good read. It's just so frustrating for me to still not know what Miranda's, the main character of All's Well, mental health issue is, unlike in Bunny when it was clearly schizophrenia. However, maybe I'm overanalyzing and All's Well is merely about the dismissal of women's pain coupled with misogyny, even from women themselves.

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