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Happy Town

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Stay calm and remain HAPPY. Help is on the way.

Perfect for fans of Gordon Korman and Jennifer L. Holm, this adventure-packed middle grade story, set in a world not too far from our own, follows a family that moves to a remote company town that seems perfect on the surface....

Keegan knows there's something off about Happy Town.

The isolated, high-tech company town is too perfect—with a dome keeping out bad weather and self-driving vehicles rumbling throughout the town delivering residents to work and school. Still, Keegan is excited to grow his art skills at Happy Town's ultra-modern middle school, even if he has less time to see his mom and stepdad because of their new jobs.

But when the two become obsessed with working and eating Happy Corp Meat Cramwich (the Microwaveable Sandwich Crammed with Meat) and Keegan gets sentenced to Mandatory Work Opportunities for refusing to follow Happy Town's shady rules, he discovers a dangerous glitch in the system that's turning the town's happy residents into zombies. Carnivorous, meat-craving, literal zombies. With his new friends Gloriana and Tank by his side, he'll need to find a way to destroy Happy Town's happy system—before there's nothing left.

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    • Kirkus

      August 15, 2024
      Consumerism turns terrifying in a creepy company town. Newly transplanted Keegan has just settled into his new home in the seemingly utopian and cloyingly named Happy Town with his mom and his stepdad, Carl. Enclosed beneath a climate-controlled dome and devoid of birds or bugs, Happy Town life is dictated by corporate magnate Arlo Corn, who brands everything with jargon (buses are known as "conveyors," and detention is called Mandatory Saturday Work Opportunity). All adults in Happy Town receive tiny cranial implants known colloquially as "imps," giving Corn an all-access pass into their subconscious (kids are thankfully spared this invasion of privacy). Commercials constantly stream as imp-embedded grown-ups fritter from one corporately decreed trend to the next--musical instruments one day and hats the next--all deducted from any pay they earn. Keegan and new friends Gloriana (who has an appetite for destruction) and Tank (a romance novel devotee) know that things aren't quite right in Happy Town, but when the adults all develop an insatiable craving for meat, things take a dark turn. Van Eekhout's satirical romp is a wonderfully silly and gross page-turner, sure to resonate with Goosebumps fans. Populated with cryogenic heads, meat-crazed zombies, and adorable animal toys that provide electric shocks, this tale will delight genre fans with its skillfully wrought intersection of social commentary and horror. Physical descriptions are minimal. By turns thrilling and thought-provoking.(Horror. 8-12)

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      October 15, 2024
      Grades 4-7 In this genre-busting creepfest, hardly has Keegan arrived with his parents in the supposed utopia built by mega-billionaire Arlo Corn, owner of a mammoth online shopping site, than he's forcibly spending his Saturdays breaking down boxes at the domed town's immense Fulfillment Center. Things go from bad to worse when the nonremovable implants that adult residents must accept suffer a glitch that turns everyone into shopaholic zombies slavering for Cramwiches, "the Microwaveable Meat Sandwich Crammed with Meat." And when those run out, they'll take any sort of fresh meat--preferably, live kid. Fortunately, Keegan finds allies in adrenaline junkie Gloriana, outsize classmate Tank, and other young survivors, just in time to head off the crisis without having to dish out any serious harm on their drooling parents. Unfortunately, the sociopathic Corn has a fiendish (and probably sequel-signaling) surprise to spring just as things are settling down. Van Eekhout delivers a winner here for readers who enjoy sinking their teeth into a zombie apocalypse low on explicit gore but well seasoned with satiric tweaks and twists.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • The Horn Book

      January 1, 2025
      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. Vicky Smith

      (Copyright 2025 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

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  • English

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