Book Review: Can't Dystopia at Least Have Gender Equality?

Among the Betrayed by Margaret Peterson Haddix

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The third novel in Haddix's Shadow Children series leaves Luke/Lee to focus on a new protagonist.  

Nina was a minor character in the second book, a girl at a neighboring school who apparently betrayed Luke and other illegal third children.  This book quickly establishes the mistake in that perspective, a device which helps draw the reader in towards sympathy faster than usual.  Haddix has the difficult task of showing Nina's reactions to a world which the reader actually understands better than she does.  We know from the first two books, for example, that one character's public persona as a member of the third-child hunting police force is actually s double agent working to protect the kids, but Nina does not. Haddix handles it well enough so that the suspense of worrying whether she will trust the right person at the right time is not flattened by our prior knowledge.

Having a female narrator highlighted one glaring imbalance which, once I realized it, colored my reading experience through the rest of the seven-book series: there are no women in traditionally powerful, male roles.  The population police are all men; the politicians are men; the families get their identities from the men.  It is nothing so blatant as written here in black and white, but it does give the impression of men's work and women's work, and it falls uncomfortably along traditional gender roles.

ELLs will find this book no harder than the previous two.  Grammar and vocabulary are not gratuitously difficult, but Haddix is trying to communicate some pretty difficult ideas about ethics, governance, trust, and more, and simpler language wouldn't have been sufficient.


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