Among the Betrayed

This is Margaret Haddix’s third book in her Shadow Children series.

Nina Idi. is a third child, a shadow child as they call them. After being told on by her best friend to the population police, she now serves time in the population prison with three other kids. The police then tell her, if she finds out who created fake ID’s for these other three shadow children, they’ll let her go free, but she didn’t, then the police would kill all of them.

This book is very dark with the sense of danger in every page. Third children are illegal in a family; the government only allows a family of four to keep the food going around. Any third child born, would have to go into hiding with a fake ID and name, or be sent to prison and be executed. When reading this book, you will see the horrible society on the inside, and the horrors of being a shadow child. Will Nina reveal the identity of the Id forger and end three little kids’ lives and in turn live herself, or do what she can to escape, and get them all killed.

With very few characters in the book, this is one of the books in the series to make you think, “What if this society was real? Who do I know that would die?” Every one of her books holds a mystery to who started the illegal third child predicament. 

Book Review by Larson U.