Book Review: All Better Now

Title: All Better Now 

Author: Neal Shusterman 

Date: 2025 

Publisher: Simon & Schuster 

ISBN: 9781534432772 

Quote: "[M]aybe it was best to lean into this pandemic." 

In the fictional world of this novel, before COVID-19 mutated back into ordinary harmless coronavirus, it mutated into a form nicknamed "Crown Royale." This virus, which has never existed in the real world, made everyone ill, killed about one of every 25 patients, and left the others in an emotional state that might be called beatific. They were cheerful, generous, even recklessly altruistic. Some of them died from things like diving into the ocean in hopes of helping rescue someone when they, themselves, weren't strong swimmers. 

Just as the news is breaking that one of the richest men in the world has given away most of his money and gone into hiding, three teenagers become involved in the Crown Royale pandemic. Ron, who spells his name with an accent mark this computer won't do because it's not short for Ronald but for Tiburon--his siblings are Leona, Pantera, Piton, and Jag--comes down with the disease. Maybe his reaction was predestinated because his idea of rebellion against his father, another of the richest men in the world, is to open a penthouse to a randomly chosen visitor, and so he's just met Mariel, who was living in a car with her barely competent mother. Ron is ill for a few days, during which Mariel's mother dies, hardly missed. They meet at a camp where happy Crown Royale survivors live as a commune. Then they take off on a road trip. They are in their early teens.

Meanwhile Morgan Willmon-Wu, the perfect stereotype of the girl who was born with so much brains, looks, and money that everyone's always hated her and so she doesn't care about anybody either, hatches a plot to get control of the fortune of a woman who was just like her, sixty or seventy years ago. Old Glynis was using her charitable foundation mostly to make her enemies uncomfortable. Morgan wants to use it to work on an antidote to Crown Royale beatification...a virus that will be even more infectious and will leave its survivors in an emotional state of pure misery. 

 When he hears of Morgan's organization's experiment, Ron wants to stop them. He's become an "alpha spreader" who continues shedding virus and infecting people on whom he breathes. Some depressed people want him to breathe on them. Some he chooses to breathe on, telling them they'll thank him in a few days. Morgan's spin doctors tell the commercial media that, if any of those people have died, he's a murderer. When Morgan hears that Mariel is the first person known to be immune to the Crown Royale virus, she orders her staff to bring Mariel to their base of operations and work with her blood. She's quite willing to use all the blood Mariel has, but that's not necessary to achieve the results she wants. 

For me this story was not as thought-provoking as the author and publisher clearly expected it to be, because I didn't find it believable. And of course, in order to get the ARC that my Kindle failed to open through a dozen or so "updates," I had to promise not to send it to any younger Nephews to see whether they found it plausible and/or thought-provoking. But let's just say I'm not sympathetic to the kind of envy that went into the characterization of Morgan. 

In our world, an emotional "high" is produced by profitable though dangerous drugs for the benefit of rich and powerful old men, and so far no teenaged girl has shown any serious interest in counteracting it. And there are drugs that produce pain and misery, too, but why bother when withdrawal from the "antidepressant" drugs can do that, and can be wielded as a threat to keep otherwise competent people defining themselves as "patients" who "need" those antidepressant pills and will do what they're told in order to keep the pills coming. And although Mariel does seem to have a sort of practical intelligence she just doesn't need to use in most of this adventure, I'd rather be Morgan's aunt than Mariel's. 

Though Glynis consistently delights me and I expect most readers will enjoy her too, I find the characterization of the two girls misogynist. Morgan has talents, works hard to develop and use them, and is portrayed as consequently becoming a monster, very close to embodying Evil. She hints at deep feelings in keeping her father's family name attached to hers, but apparently she lost her father early enough that the only way she can honor that side of her family is by reenacting a conspiracy theory about the origins of "Wu-Flu"--no family ties, no cultural interests, no interest in Chinese wildlife. In our real world nineteen is a fairly horrible age to be and, on the whole, the emotionally reserved, high-achieving sort of nineteen-year-olds are the ones most likely to be tolerable to adults and become interesting human beings in their twenties. Mariel has only survival skills; through most of the story she's allowed to shut them down and just ride along being Ron's passive Cinderella girlfriend, and then she might be said to betray him, and then she's a helpless damsel in distress until the obligatory explosion scene in which she and Ron get to rescue each other. So, if teenaged girls don't aspire to or achieve anything more than just surviving the bad things life throws at them, they're pleasant to know but untrustworthy, and if they do aspire and achieve they're going to inflict permanent misery on the world? ??? 

Not that the virus scenario would be credible if somebody like Klaus Schwab was working to develop the misery virus, in this book, but somebody like Schwab would be more credible in that role than somebody more like a Trump granddaughter.

If you can suspend disbelief in its premises and take this "what if" story seriously enough to discuss and debate it, you'll probably like it. It's Neal Shusterman, so you know it's skilfully written, if a bit on the p.c. side (except for its dim views of teenaged girls and China), with plausible dialogues, just enough description, and lots of physical action that would make a lively movie. Its premises are too dissonant with reality for me, but obviously not for many people.