Today’s stack is all about anxiety and worry and depression, but from some very different perspectives. Two are young adult novels that posit two very different solutions, and one is a kid’s book that helps kids navigate big feelings.
HappyHead by Josh Silver
Sebastian Seaton just wants his family to be proud of him, but he’s always afraid he doesn’t measure up the way his little sister does. She listens to the right music, hangs out with the right people, and is just much more sure about herself. Seb, on the other hand, is constantly second-guessing himself. So his family is thrilled that he’s been invited to HappyHead, an experimental mental health center that claims it has a scientific method to address the unhappiness that seems to be plaguing the youth. (Seb isn’t quite as thrilled as his parents, but at this point he’s willing to try anything.)
The kids are all given green hoodies and sweatpants (and assigned “green” team names — Seb is on Acid Green), and they’re presented with various exercises and tasks that start off unsettling and get more and more bizarre as the two weeks progresses. One of Seb’s teammates, Eleanor, is extremely driven and soon decides that she and Seb are going to win — though Seb isn’t really sure that “winning” is the point of HappyHead. On the other hand, Seb finds himself drawn to another teammate, Finn, who keeps getting into trouble and resisting the rules. He’s painted as just a troublemaker, but maybe he knows something more about HappyHead?
This book is a YA dystopia, along the lines of The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner, where young adults are thrown into nightmarish situations by powerful systems and the adults who work for them. You can tell pretty early on that something is a bit off about the whole situation, but it’s unclear at first what they’re up to or why. Seb in particular is so eager for approval that he’s easily influenced; even when he finally gets some answers and seems to be going in the right direction, he doubts himself whenever things feel dangerous or risky. As a reader, I felt for him because he’s under so much pressure, but it was also frustrating to see him constantly questioning his own decisions.
HappyHead is the first book in a planned duology, so it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger and you won’t find out how things get resolved in this first volume. I wasn’t sure what to expect going into the book other than it was about mental health — I didn’t realize it was going to be this type of dystopia. I may read the second one just to see how things pan out, but in general I’m not as big a fan of these stories that feature mysterious organizations with seemingly unlimited resources. Josh Silver, the author, has worked as a mental health nurse, and some of his experiences inspired this book. HappyHead does raise some questions about the way we think about happiness and success, the way external expectations can color who we are and want to be, though at least in the first book it doesn’t present any good options for the teens.
All Better Now by Neal Shusterman
I’ve really enjoyed several of Neal Shusterman’s YA novels in the past — I’ve written about his Arc of a Scythe series about a post-mortality world, as well as Roxy, a book about addiction and prescription drugs — so I was very curious to see his take on happiness. In All Better Now, there’s another coronavirus on the loose — known as Crown Royale, this new virus is even more deadly than COVID-19, but it also has a very strange side effect: the people who recover from it are happy. Content.
The book jumps around among several different characters, and also shows how the world at large is reacting to the virus. There are those who are terrified of catching it, and those who are actively seeking it out, hoping to find happiness. But there are a lot of rumors and disinformation, and it’s hard to know what’s true: are these recoverees truly happy, or have they been brainwashed? Is the virus a parasite that’s taking over the bodies, or is this evolution’s response to human greed and selfishness? What’s certain is that the virus is having a big effect on behavior and thus the economy. People who feel content aren’t buying a lot of things they don’t need. The world’s richest man recovered from it and decided to resign from all his companies and give his money to charity. The recoverees are generous to a fault, even to the point of putting themselves in unnecessary danger if they think they can help somebody else.
All Better Now was really engrossing, and the cast of characters is great. One of my favorites was Dame Glynis Havilland, a wealthy old woman who primarily uses her wealth to make herself look good in ways that antagonize her enemies. Having heard the story about other billionaires, she decides that the person she must protect her wealth from is, in fact, the person she might become if she contracts and survives Crown Royale, so she goes to great lengths to make some arrangements … and then has to deal with that reality later.
It makes for a really fascinating thought experiment. Is contentment the same thing as happiness? Would feeling content also make you more generous and kind to other people? What sorts of things would happen around the world with this disease — who benefits and who is harmed? There are people who decide that the world needs Crown Royale — that they should try to spread it as much as possible, though they don’t all agree on the best way to do so. There are those who feel that it needs to be eliminated at all costs, that it is an existential threat to humanity. And, of course, there are plenty of people caught in the middle — people who aren’t really up to date on the latest news, people who have fallen for propaganda or misinformation, people who bristle against mask mandates but are fearful of becoming pod people.
If you like this sort of speculative fiction — and are okay just suspending your disbelief for the premise — then it’s an exciting journey.
Why Do I Feel So Worried? by Tammi Kirkness
Okay, while the first two books in this column are fictionalized accounts of things that may or may not cure unhappiness, this one is a non-fiction book that is intended to help kids calm their big emotions. One of the tricky things for younger kids when they get upset is the ability to articulate why they’re upset — is it because of embarrassment or procrastination or bullying? Do they feel fidgety or clumsy or energetic?
This book, which kids can use with a parent or on their own depending on reading level, starts with two questions using illustrated faces to help figure them out: what emotion are you feeling and how strong is it?
Then, the book is kind of like a flowchart. Most of the pages ask a Yes or No question — if you answer Yes, then there are some simple activities on that page, sometimes thought experiments and sometimes physical movements. If you answer No, then you go to the next page, or perhaps a new section of the book. There are sections on anxieties about school and home, along with a “something else” section that gets to other reasons kids might feel worried. Of course, this book won’t solve all of your kid’s worries (or your own), but I think it’s particularly helpful for identifying the worry or negative feelings, which can often lead to some relief and point to the next steps to take.
Disclosure: I received copies of these titles for review. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and give money to somebody other than Jeff Bezos.
My Current Reads
I managed to find the other five volumes of Bad Machinery by John Allison at the library, since they’re out of print, and realized that I had somehow read Book 7 at some point, but not the others. I really enjoyed finally getting to these — in particular, I think Allison did a good job of aging up the kids over the course of the series, and although I’m sad the series didn’t go on longer, I agree with what he said in the afterword to Book 10: he wanted to keep the story appropriate for young readers, but also wanted to stay true to the characters, and felt that if he continued into their late teens, the cases that they might pursue and their interests and life events may no longer be great for readers who could be a decade younger. However, I was pleased to see that I could continue following the later adventures of Charlotte Grote (with some appearances of some of her childhood friends) in some of Allison’s later comics on his website — what happens to a kid detective when she becomes a young adult?
I’ve also finished a few other comic books — more on those in a future column — and I started reading Luminous by Silvia Park, a sci-fi book about robots, set in a unified Korea.
