Among the Enemy

Among the Enemy is a novel by the American writer Margaret Peterson Haddix, published in 2005 and the sixth of the seven Shadow Children books.

The series is built on a simple and effective idea: the population law is justified by a lie about the world's resources, and the children who are in danger because of it are the same children who can see that the official account does not add up. By this point in the sequence the characters have moved from hiding to active resistance, and the book puts three of them into the machinery of the Population Police itself, which means their work consists of documents, identity papers and the ordinary cruelties of an organisation that has been given unlimited authority. The series has also accumulated a large cast of children who have each learned something different about the government, and this volume puts them in a position where obedience, paperwork and one act of refusal decide what happens to a truckload of them. Haddix writes for readers of about ten and up, and the books are short and fast, but she does not soften the premise, since the killings, the informers and the separations are all part of the story. The final volume, Among the Free, follows the same rebellion to the end.