Happy Bookers
Before we begin
This issue turns the spotlight on All Better Now, Neal Shusterman's near-future novel about a virus that spreads happiness — the book at the center of our February 26 gathering.
Everything ahead is no-spoiler territory: the world of the story, the fault lines running through it, and the phrases reviewers have reached for. Just enough to sharpen the appetite.
Mark the calendar
The February gathering
- Date
- Thursday, February 26, 2026
- Book
- All Better Now
- Author
- Neal Shusterman
The facts
All Better Now at a glance
Published by Simon & Schuster on February 4, 2025, All Better Now runs 528 pages — a near-future story from Neal Shusterman in which happiness itself becomes the contagion.
The setup
A virus that spreads joy
The story unfolds a few years after a Covid-like pandemic, in a world of masks, vaccine lines, and misinformation campaigns — and then along comes Crown Royale, a new airborne virus with a strange twist.
Crown Royale kills roughly one in twenty-five of the people it infects. Everyone who survives comes out the other side permanently, radiantly content: stress, depression, greed, and fear stripped away, and the senses feeling rejuvenated.
As society splits over whether that contentment is a gift or a threat, teens from opposite ends of the wealth gap are pulled into the fight over the world's strangest epidemic.
The fault lines
A world split three ways
Crown Royale doesn't just change the people who catch it — it redraws the map of society.
And while the camps argue, commerce, media, and political power wobble under the strain.
- The recoverees Survivors who call the new contentment a gift — and spread it willingly.
- The uninfected Those who want nothing to do with it, and fear the people who do.
- The immune minority A rare few the virus simply cannot touch.
From the reviews
Crown Royale, in one phrase
disease of mindless euphoria
Publishers Weekly, describing the virus at the heart of the story
Setting the scene
A fog-slicked morning in San Francisco
The story's anchor city is San Francisco, where Mariel Mudroch — an unhoused teenager — wakes in the back seat of her mother's car on a fog-slicked street, one vehicle in a row sheltering other displaced people, in a city half-emptied by the pandemic.
The people
Faces in the crowd
The action plays out globally, with short vignettes of ordinary people around the world — but a few names anchor the story.
- Rón Escobedo An ultra-wealthy teenager whose world collides with Mariel's, from the far side of the wealth gap.
- Dame Havilland A Hungarian-born billionaire whose fortune is tangled up in the vaccine effort.
- Morgan Willmon-Wu An heir whose inheritance is tied to the same fight.
The look of it
Images that linger
- A burning fever and a hard cough giving way to serene, unguarded calm
- Masks, gloves, testing lines, and vaccine vials — a heightened echo of the Covid years
- Glass-tower penthouses looming over a teenager living in a car
- Billboards and broadcasts warning that contentment is dangerous
- Auction-tagged art, donated luxury goods, emptied mansions
- Queues and clandestine gatherings of people hoping to catch the virus
- Snapshots of strangers around the world reacting to the same headline
The word from reviewers
How it reads
Reviewers have reached for some vivid phrases:
- Darkly witty and wonderfully over-the-top
- A cerebral, morally gray ethical thought experiment
- Thought-provoking and grimly enjoyable
- Unsettling
- Fast-paced and addictive
- Stand-like short vignettes of ordinary lives
Food for thought
Questions to chew on
The premise alone hands a book club plenty to argue about:
- If a virus could strip away your stress, greed, and fear — would you want to catch it?
- Is permanent contentment a gift, or a symptom?
- Who gets to decide whether the world should be cured of sadness — and who profits from that call?
- Can happiness itself be dangerous?
Happy Bookers
Until next time
Whether Crown Royale sounds like a gift or a warning to you, Shusterman has handed this club a bottomless argument. Bring your opinions — and maybe a mask.
Happy reading, Bookers. See you at the next gathering.