As gloriously unhinged and wild as Bunny is. There’s a quality imbued in the voice Awad creates for her characters that feel almost like Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness mixed with her letters. Where it’s just this is both how I think, a high degree of verisimilitude, and there’s no censor whatsoever. Coupled with very dynamic scene cuts and frenetic meter, there really just isn’t anything like this or Bunny (the only two books I’ve read of Awads’ work).

This feels like it hits so fine a point regarding societal expectations placed on women; the internalized disassociation of humanity from empathy, especially from those who particularly would benefit from it; the ways in which those with chronic pain are erased and stymied and actively misbelieved. Especially the latter. I have friends with fibromyalgia and the years of undiagnosed bullshit they went through from doctors who claimed it was all psychosomatic or “just stress” is actually astounding.

This book, to me, who knows nothing of the play this parodies and parallels, All’s Well That Ends Well, felt like this book was all about exploring inverted power dynamics as much as the higher societal concerns mentioned above. At a base, human level Miranda, the main character is simply not able to get what she needs from people and is not seen as someone of value whatsoever, all due to her pain. Though this is all heavily from Miranda’s perspective, which shifts from very close psychic distance to something completely dissociative at apt and telling times, I think that this perspective lens itself well to a commonality any reader will experience, simply because everyone, at some point or another, has probably felt like a burden before. And yet very few have also had the additional component of a disability of some kind.

While writing about alienation the reader is able to surmount the internalized societal standards of able-bodied, hyper-sexualized, women who lack agency in their lives due to these projections.

It then also counters this with the simultaneous empowerment and surprising lack of agency the opposite would have, which I thought was quite interesting. Heroine and villainous in one. And eminently relatable due to the structure.

Where this faltered a bit for me was the beginning. Awad keeps you coming with her unique prose—something that, I think, will either click with you or it won’t—but you really do feel Miranda’s pain. It is actually difficult to empathize with her at the start. And we know why. But the book does such a good job of casting the reader as a judgemental critic that it can be a bit of a slog.

The wild thing is that when it’s inverted you’re right there with the characters, reappraising Miranda in terms of patriarchal standards. Even when she’s empowered and villainous it’s also horrific, and that’s the beauty of this text, in my opinion..

Will everyone struggle through the around 25% to get there? I’m not sure. The nice thing is that for the people who have issues with the first portion, I can say that probably the book is About exactly said issues. Judge it by the whole story and all that. But who hasn’t put things aside? This is why, I think possibly like Bunny, this really depends if you click with Awad’s voice or not.

I have a feeling as thematically robust as this book was for me, I think I missed some things simply by now being familiar with the play it references and not really knowing plays, in the same way knowing MFA’s and being a huge literary nerd really helped me appreciate Bunny. I’m somewhat in the dark regarding the metaphor, allegory situation when it comes to Miranda and Helen, plays and productions, in general, and theatre “stuff” in general.

Even still, I adore this book.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC. I was very excited to be approved for this one.