Among the Imposters

Among the Imposters is a young adult novel by Margaret Peterson Haddix, published in 2001 and the second book of the Shadow Children sequence. Its central character, Luke Garner, has spent his life hiding.

He is a third child in a society where families are permitted only two, which makes him illegal and puts him at risk from the Population Police. To leave his home at all he has to pretend to be somebody else. He cannot ask anybody what to do, because the question itself would give him away.

The identity he is given belongs to a boy called Lee Grant, who has recently died. Luke goes to school under that name, and his first experience of the world outside his own house is bewildering in ways he had not anticipated.

The school has not a single window anywhere in it, which is the detail that tells him something about the institution and about how much he still does not know. The novel follows a boy who has exchanged one kind of hiding for another.