"HappyHead" is not just a book; it's a journey into the heart of teenage angst and the desperate search for happiness.

The story follows Seb, a teenager who, like many, is struggling to find his place in the world. When he's offered a spot at the HappyHead retreat, it seems like a dream come true—a chance to finally make his parents proud and change how others perceive him. But as Seb gets drawn into the retreat's enigmatic atmosphere and the mysterious Finn's orbit, he begins to question everything. The retreat's challenges grow increasingly disturbing, and the promise of happiness seems ever elusive.

It's a page-turner that captures your attention from the first chapter and doesn't let go. It's a thought-provoking read that doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of mental health and the pressures faced by today's youth.

"HappyHead" is a must-read for fans of young adult fiction, especially those who appreciate a story that challenges and provokes. It's a book that will stay with you long after you turn the last page, prompting discussions and perhaps even inspiring change.

Seb has been selected to go to a remote Scottish retreat where teens will attempt an intense course in happiness. Except, not everything is as it seems.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Seb is just an ordinary teen. He lacks the confidence of others, and struggles with anxiety, but is a likeable chap. He has been selected for the first government-backed HappyHead course, and he's going to do his best to fit in and succeed.
The course starts simply enough, but soon the teens attending find themselves doing bizarre, and sometimes dangerous tests.
His new friend (and instant crush) Finn, rocked the HappyHead boat, and the two of them have to get to the bottom of what is really happening.

I really liked our main character, Seb. Quite a few people do - Seb is so desperate to please others, he has a subconscious habit of altering his personality to match what he thinks is expected of him. As such, he ends up being very successful in the eyes of the judges at Happy Head.
Which is quite a novelty for Seb, as he's a bit of a loaner, with only one good friend at home. Even his parents aren't his biggest supporters, always wanting him to do better and try harder.

The not-so-good.
I don't get it.
First, despite the review snippets on the cover, I did not find this "Dark and thrilling", nor was it "Like Hunger Games but better".
It's friggin' weird, but it wasn't dark or thrilling.
About 75% in, there's the "big reveal" which threatens to kill off some teens, but that's the only similarity I found with Hunger Games.

<spoiler>
I don't get it.
I don't get the premise. I don't get what HappyHead is, or what it's supposed to achieve.
I don't get how and why Seb and the other 99 teens are selected. Especially once the big reveal is revealed - it just seems like a very poor sampling choice for that particular aim.

I don't get why everyone is relaxed about having a chip implanted in their collar. I think this is based in the near future, but it doesn't sound like it's a normal thing.
I don't get once the chip is implanted, how useless it is. It just monitors the person's health and nutritional needs - Seb and Finn are able to have private discussions and run away from the main compound, without being overheard or scanned.

I don't get the course and the tests. They're friggin' random and I don't get how they help the Assessors, or the participants.
I don't get the adults running this course - some of them seem to think they're following Dr Stone's good version of HappyHead, but do Madame Manning's weird games that intentionally hurt the kids.
I mean, seriously?
</spoiler>

I won't be continuing with the series.

This was a unique and well written story. I loved the premise and the book didn’t disappoint. I did struggle with most of the characters as they just didn’t feel developed enough, however, I loved the protagonist, Seb. Overall, an exciting and unique story.

A great start to a new dystopia series. Being compared to The Hunger Games and Squid Games is always gonna reel me in and this held up well.

We start with Seb being taken by his parents to a 2 week 'happy' camp....what can go wrong with that? But as expected things start to feel really ominous pretty quickly. There are many shocking twists and turns which leads us to a cliffhanger ending.

Really looking forward to book 2!

I’m not sure why it took me so long to get round to reading this book, the premise is brilliant and very topical. It’s really easy to read (well it’s uncomfortable in places but the prose is lovely), and the characters well defined. The ‘big bad’ becomes more obvious as you go though and by the end it’s impossible to understand how it wasn’t obvious from page 1. Very well crafted.

Loved it and have been recommending it in my school library - but it’s begging for a sequel! I thought I had already submitted a review - apologies. Great eye catching cover and title.

An original and solid book with great characters and plenty of promise. Really enjoyed it and will look out for more

Unfortunately this book wasn’t for me; I think that the marketing and book comparisons for this one might have been a little off.

I love the queer rep and there was definitely a lot going on to keep me interested, but there were parts of the book which felt dragged out and parts which felt under-developed.

I do think I’ll give the second book in the series a go because you certainly can’t judge an author by their debut alone, and the concept for this was undeniably interesting.

When the desire for wellness and happiness takes a more sinister turn, Happy Head project is born. A group of teenagers are gathered and put through increasingly traumatic testing in a bid to create happy humans and an ideal community. Of course, enforced happiness is not going to work and the teenagers begin to rebel against the rules with dire consequences. An interesting read and a great debut novel. #happyhead #joshsilver #netgalley #yaread #welfare #statecontrol

As debuts go HappyHead is an absolute triumph. A compelling, twisty read that has you addicted to it from the very first page with it's original plot and captivating characters.

I've been sitting on this review for a while as I'm not sure how to write it. Even now, I'm still not exactly sure how I feel about this, but I wanted to show you guys that I have read this.

The backstory to this is the same as some of my other reads of late: I originally had an eProof from the lovely publisher via NetGalley. However, over Easter weekend, my Amazon was hacked/deleted, all my eProofs got wiped off my kindle. But, I saw this on sale for 99p, I bought it without a second thought, as this book intrigued me as soon as I first heard it.

When Seb is offered a place at a radical retreat to tackle the national crisis of teenage unhappiness, he is determined to do well. But he find himself being pulled to the mysterious Finn, Seb begins to realise that there's something deeply wrong with HappyHead as the tasks that are meant to be help their wellbeing become more and more disturbing...

Like I said in my first sentence, I been sitting on this for a while because I am completely torn over how I feel about this book. This book has really strong positives that work in its favour but, at the same time, there is one big issue that we can't escape from.

The positives. Let's start there. I loved the idea of this book tackling mental health and how people we trust can abuse the level of trust and power, use people's mental health and gaslighting to their advance. We see it in the news so often about people in position of trust who go on the misuse it to horrible and dangerous effect (yes, I was reading this when the Phillip Scofield story broke and am writing this on the Sunday when the mystery BBC presenter story is beginning to come out). The same goes with gay conversion.

Also, I really liked our lead character of Seb. He's relatable, a bit naive, desperate to please. We've all been there, haven't we, as teenagers? He's gay and it's nice of have a lead queer character where their sexuality identity isn't the driving force of the story. Plus, Seb's internal voice is really funny. Very dark, very sarcastic, and it made me warm to him within the first few chapters.

I also liked the writing. Josh Silver's writing was easy to read and was compulsive reading. It wasn't the the most descriptive writing, but there were chapters that tackled Seb's mental health that were gripping and were the best chapters in the whole story.

I did say there was one big issue that I had with this book and there was no way I could escape it: I feel like I read this before and it has been done better, There were feels of dystopian novels and TV shows that tackle the set-up better.

Am I going to read the second and final book in this series? Yeah, I think so. It was an addictive holiday, read on the beach with a nice cocktail. But it didn't leave much of an impact. Hopefully, with the next book, it was give us a sucker-punch. Plus, with Taron Egergton going to adapt the book into a movie, I think this will make a really interesting and gripping movie.

Hmmm… Highly readable, but derivative and unsubtle, this book almost falls into the "with that many puff quotes it's bound to be naff" category, but doesn't quite. We have a lad, Sebastian, plucked by agencies unknown and for reasons untold, to be taken to a high-tech, new-build country mansion, and isolated for a fortnight in order to drum all the badness that is modern teenagerdom out from him. In other words, what we're left waiting well over a hundred pages for confirmation of – the time this becomes a metaphor, with our Bowie-loving hero, for gay conversion therapy.

Before then we have a lot of tropes we will all recognise, with the defence being the target teen might not have done. An unspoken set of rules where the better bedroom is given to the most conforming, a concentration camp-styled enclosure peopled by perma-grinning staff, matching the smiley emblem (seriously?!) all over the place's messaging.

Something so eager to borrow from so much else needs to be told stonkingly well to engage, and this is halfway there. It's just riddled with the inevitable – from within the whole camp to the foursome Seb first finds himself put into. You can see beats of this coming from miles off, unfortunately – including the fact it has a cliff-hanger ending. The biggest sin, for me, perhaps is not that the Scotland setting is only thought worthy of mentioning halfway through, and not that sound is said to come from a microphone, which is impossible, and not that someone questing for food stumbles through a vegetable garden and doesn't ask for anything, but that the characters and set-up and plot are less intelligent than the reader. Witness –

<spoiler>It is absolutely stupid to think that tracking devices in the chips inserted in these guys are only turned on near the end – if the people behind this were serious, and able to put in electrified fences behind their founder's back, they would have included a tracker from the start. And if the people running it are so evilly heteronormative, as the message of it all has it, how come Seb can be around his crush so much with the diet-analysing, temperature-taking chip in him and they are not aware of the physiological changes the combination of the two lads has? It would have been so obvious his pulse and so on would have changed, so they should have known about the pash all along. </spoiler>

This is definitely readable, with an immediacy and high concept drama that will appeal to many. But when I see so much room for improvement, and as hidden above some stoopid plot holes, I cannot really thank it that much. It's an energetic, and interesting, yet clumsy and naive curate's egg, and it's up to the potential buyer to work out if the positives outweigh the negatives there enough.

The best YA book I’ve read in a long time! HappyHead is a unique dystopian thriller with an engaging and relatable protagonist. In this book, the protagonist, Seb, is invited on a radical retreat for teenagers designed to combat the teen mental health crisis. However, it soon becomes apparent that the retreat is far more radical than any of the attendees could have anticipated, and suspicions arise that perhaps it doesn’t have such good intentions…

I would thoroughly recommend this book to teens and adults alike!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

This book is another YA novel that evokes the narrative of the Hunger Games, but with a twist. The focus on mental health is an interesting route, as mental health is a real problem for young people across the world so you could imagine an initiative being rolled out to try and solve this. I also really liked the relationship between Seb and Finn. However the book didn't really answer any of the questions I had by the end, which I guess is to inspire you to read the next one, but really left me feeling a little frustrated. But I did enjoy the read enough to search out the next book when it arrives.

A dystopian near future YA book that takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride through the lives of teenagers chosen to have their unhappy lives transformed.

HappyHead is a timely book that explores the contemporary concerns of the disengaged youth, caused by solitary lives driven by online living and pressure to be other than you are.
Following selection, participants are challenged to complete increasingly dangerous tasks, working together in allotted teams until only the most successful survive. Seb surprises himself by excelling, but what criteria are really being used and what will happen to those that fail...falling down the rankings?

Silver has created an interesting premise with echoes of Squid Game or The Hunger Games. As the stakes are raised, reality questioned and a realisation that perhaps those attributes prized at the retreat are not necessarily the best that human nature has to offer.

What a great and terrifying concept, a world where depression and anxiety in young people is micro-managed by the state to make the person happier and healthier. Seb is picked to be part of the pilot scheme for Happyhead along with 100 other young people - they are tagged with a tracker, given intense psychological profiling and pitted against one another to try and suceed in the trial.
Some of the elements didnt completely work for me but overall , a gripping and well -planned story with lots to recommend it

I liked the book but it's not better than the Hunger Games!!!

The book reminded me of Nine Perfect Strangers, which I really did not like. But it was interesting

A difficult book to tear your eyes from, but even more difficult to describe and review. As I sit here, with no notion of where to begin, all I can remember is the overwhelming feeling of having to inhale every word, and the utter gutwrench of the finale.

Silver has done something special here. Although some would have you believe this novel is akin to The Hunger Games, I don’t subscribe to that opinion. Yes, we have a group of teenagers in an unsettling and veiled circumstance, where trusting authority may or may not be the best option. The similarities end there.

We explore the idea that an epidemic of unhappiness has infiltrated the minds of the nation, particularly our young people. What if preventative measures could be taken to allow our young minds to be happy? Some sort of wellness retreat or boot camp? Enter HappyHead - the one thing that will make everything better. Tasks, assessments, and teamwork all combine to allow the students to be analysed, catergorised, and ultimately scored. It all seems fairly innocuous, if odd, until things begin to be cast in a strange shadow of doubt.

I was immediately engrossed with this. Silver’s writing allows you become immersed with Seb’s experiences working through both the HappyHead process and his own identity, as they seem not to fit together. From the beginning, there are undertones of disquiet - something feels off; I believed my brain had been programmed to persevere at all costs, and to discover the motives and person behind all of these perplexing cogs.

To say anything else would be cruel of me, as this is one best experienced with an open and untarnished mind. What I will say is that the finale came at me like a slap in the face, and I am craving a sequel.

This is an original YA LGBTQ+ read about Seb, who is being driven to 'Happy Head' (a facility where scientists work on a cure for adolescent depression)having been 'specially selected'.... What follows are a series of tests that must be undertaken - some, not for the squeamish! Josh Silver has created an excellent dystopian debut novel that is certainly set up for a sequel.

It is bonkers in parts and definitely only read if you're into cliff hanger endings - it's done so well though and has you wanting more.

Thanks to OneWorld Publications for the opportunity to preview .

This is a really strong debut novel. A great idea well executed. Kind of like The Hunger Games crossed with Only Ever Yours and The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Believable characters, twists, an ending I didn't see coming and potential for a franchise!