Among the Impostors

I have just read the book titled Among the Impostors. The author of this book is Margaret Peterson Haddix. This book is a sequel to Among the Hidden. In Among the Hidden, a boy named Luke is hiding from the world because he is an illegal third child. He shouldn’t exist because the government limited the amount of children to each family to two because of the decreasing amounts of food. Luke gets sick of hiding and wants to make a difference, so he gets a fake I.D. with the help of a neighbor and goes to a boarding school. Among the Impostors continues on with Luke’s life in the boarding school, and shows that no matter how people act, they can be very different on the inside. At the boarding school, there is a boy named Jason who gives Luke a very hard time. He has him do push-ups and a bunch of other pointless tasks just in order to get into his bed. Luke is getting sick of it, and one day, he notices that a door is open in the school. It shows the outdoors, and Luke knows that’s his only chance of escaping the wretched school. Once he gets outside, he notices that it’s surrounded by a huge forest that stretches for miles. He ventures outside and makes himself a pitiful garden, but he feels good about it anyway. That was the only thing that kept him there. Then one day he went outside and found that his garden was ruined by people who had stomped all over it. Luke cooks up a plan to bust the people that ruined his garden. He sneaks out during the night and waits for the people to arrive outside. He finds that one of them is Jason. As he eavesdrops on their conversation, he finds out that they’re all third children too.

Once I finished this book, I felt irritated that Luke chose to stay at the school even though he was told he could leave by a trusted neighbor and life-saver (p. 169). He wanted to stay at the school to help all of the third children there live their life without fear of being discovered. I don’t see how he could help the world like he dreamed by having every boy in the school contribute to the garden out back (p. 172). I think he would have done better if he had accepted the offer to go to a real and good school instead of staying at the boarding school with a bunch of low-social boys that would give Luke a bad influence.