Book Review: All Better Now by Neal Shusterman

Publisher’s Book Description: From New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman comes a young adult thriller about a world where happiness is contagious but the risks of catching it may be just as dangerous as the cure.
A deadly and unprecedented virus is spreading. But those who survive it experience long-term effects no one has ever seen before: utter contentment. Soon after infection, people find the stress, depression, greed, and other negative feelings that used to weigh them down are gone.
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More and more people begin to revel in the mass unburdening. But not everyone. People in power—who depend on malcontents and prey on the insecure to sell their products, and convince others they need more, new, faster, better everything—know this new state of being is bad for business. Surely, without anger or jealousy as motivators, productivity will grind to a halt and the world will be thrown into chaos. Campaigns start up to convince people that being eternally happy is dangerous. The race to find a vaccine begins. Meanwhile, a growing movement of Recoverees plan ways to spread the virus as fast as they can, in the name of saving the world.
It’s nearly impossible to determine the truth when everyone with a platform is pushing their agenda. Three teens from very different backgrounds who’ve had their lives upended in very different ways find themselves at the center of a power play that could change humanity forever.
Karen’s Thoughts: Neal Shusterman is no stranger to the dystopian novel, see Dry and the Unwind series, just to get you started. I have long been a fan of his work and this did not disappoint. This was a really interesting take, and had a lot of very relevant ties to current events.
I want to start by mentioning that this is one of few YA books that acknowledges that Covid happened. Pick the Lock by A. S. King is another. This is not surprising as both authors care deeply about teens and mental health and recognize that teens can deal with deep and dark things. They also recognize the very real impact that Covid has had on our teens. So kudos to Shusterman for this inclusion.
Shusterman is also a big proponent of mental health, in part for some very real personal reasons. So the idea of happiness being a contagion that you can spread and the question of whether you should is a very interesting question. It’s hard to think of happiness as being a bad idea, right? But there are some good examples in this book of how toxic positivity can have very real life consequences. Just as with his book Bruiser (which I love and always highly recommend), there are some deep and important discussions to be had in here about how and why we must deal with our emotions and how toxic positivity is, well, toxic.
There’s a lot to unpack here: ethics, corporate power, capitalism, and more. It’s deep, it’s dark and it’s profound. It’s also, just a smidge too long. And I don’t say that because I hate long books, but because it starts to drag a big in the midsection. That is my only real quibble with this book. But in the end, I do highly recommend this book. I have found myself describing it as The Stand for teens, high praise indeed because I love that book. I also love a good pandemic (in story, not real life – that honestly sucks), and this one was creative and fascinating.
One other thing I would like to point out, this book is interesting because it has multiple points of view and some of those points of view are adult points of view. Some of them kind of evil adults. In the end I would say that this novel, as many YA novels are today, is very solidly a crossover novel between YA and adult, but it reads as more YA in voice and has more YA appeal than a lot of newer ones do; those tend to read more as adult that are just being marketed as YA. This is in no small part because Neal Shusterman is a YA author with long term market and writing cred who has always cared about teens. And for that, I say thank you.
Fair warning for those that need it, this book deals with the topic of suicide.
Highly Recommended
Filed under: Book Reviews

About Karen Jensen, MLS
Karen Jensen has been a Teen Services Librarian for almost 32 years. She created TLT in 2011 and is the co-editor of The Whole Library Handbook: Teen Services with Heather Booth (ALA Editions, 2014).
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