AMONG THE BETRAYED

Billed as a companion to Among the Hidden (1998), this addition to Haddix’s burgeoning series about an Orwellian future in which third children are hunted down and killed follows the moral dilemma of a peripheral character from Among the Impostors (2001). The Population Police has captured Nina because of her involvement with a supposed plot to expose third children. An undercover third child herself, she is offered a deal: confirm the illegality of three other suspected third children imprisoned along with her, and she will go free. As she gets to know these children and sorts through her own sense of betrayal at the hands of her former boyfriend, she must choose between saving them and betraying them. There are no real surprises here; readers familiar with the previous novels will recognize the patterns of duplicity, and Nina’s own eventual moral decision is never truly in doubt. This text’s strength, in common with its predecessors’, is its ability to imagine the bizarre and surreal experiences of its protagonists. Nina has been confined and hidden since birth; this is borne in on the reader with telling details: “ ‘The sun rises?’ Nina asked. She’d never thought about how it got up into the sky. In pictures and on TV it was just there, overhead.” But by the third time around, there is a certain sameness to the revelations of the end, in which it is revealed that Nina’s ordeal has been an elaborate plot to test her fitness for membership in a resistance to the government’s restrictions on third children. Along with Nina and Luke (who makes a cameo appearance from the other titles), the reader may be justified in asking, just how much longer before the Revolution? (Fiction. 9-14)