Happy Town
by Greg van Eekhout
Intermediate    Harper/HarperCollins    208 pp.
10/24    9780063253360    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780063253384    $9.99

Narrator Keegan thinks his family’s recent move to a box-shaped house in Happy Town is just another in a string of relocations. Located in the Nevada desert, Happy Town is, according to Keegan, “the biggest online shop in the world.” His new home just seems weird, with its driverless “conveyor” that carries kids to Happy Academy and its fleet of advertising blimps. But things turn dark very quickly. First he learns that Happy Town owns the rights to all his schoolwork; then he must take part in a Mandatory Saturday Work Opportunity (they don’t call it detention); then he arrives home to find that his parents—along with all the other adults—have purchased marching-band instruments in response to an ad. Something’s up with the implants all Happy Town adults have installed in their heads, Keegan and his friends reason, and it’s up to the kids to save them all from becoming “band-instrument-hoarding…and-possibly-cannibalistic zombies.” This is the broadest of satires, and van Eekhout leaves nothing up to chance in the delivery of his message: “If you can control what people want, you can control what they think [and] what they do.” But if it’s unsubtle, it’s also funny, and readers will relish every outlandish detail as much as van Eekhout clearly does.

From the ">January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.