Among the Free

Among the Free is a novel by the American writer Margaret Peterson Haddix, published in 2006 and the seventh and last book of the Shadow Children series.

The book is the one where the series' political argument is completed, since removing the Population Police does not put free people in charge but leaves a group who are happy to keep the same machinery with a different name. Luke has spent years being careful, and he now has to work out how much of the revolution he is responsible for and how much of the peace he can influence, which is a great deal to ask of a thirteen-year-old who began the series hiding in an attic. His own history, the hidden room and the years of pretending to be somebody else, is what allows him to recognise how quickly a new authority can come to look like the old one. Haddix keeps her chapters short and her scenes concrete, so the politics arrive through checkpoints, identification papers, rumours and a crowd's behaviour rather than through speeches. The earlier books in the series follow other children in the same world, and this volume brings several of them together for the ending.