Found ~ Margaret Peterson Haddix

Found (The Missing Series: Book 1) ~ Margaret Peterson Haddix

What a great fast paced story! But when I first began to think about summarizing it, I had some doubts. For one thing I don’t want to give away the ending. Secondly, this story is pretty simple to begin with, but toward the end it gets complicated! What I’ve decided is that I will summarize in two paragraphs, one with spoilers and one without. The next paragraph is free of spoilers, so read on!

Jonah has known he was adopted his whole life. His parents have been very open and honest. If you judge them based on all the books about adoption (and Jonah has read them all) they are perfect adoptive parents. Jonah has a pretty typical life. He’s thinking of trying out for his school’s basketball team. He’s in seventh grade. He has a younger sister named Katherine (who’s not adopted). He and his sister annoy each other and bicker like many other brothers and sisters do. Jonah’s average life gets upset big time when he receives a letter in the mail one day. It reads, “You are one of the missing,” and it has no name or return address on it. At first Jonah believes it’s someone playing a joke on him (someone that knows he’s adopted). But then his friend Chip gets a letter too. Chip tells his parents about the letter, and tells them that the letters can’t be someone making a joke about adoption because he’s not adopted. Chip goes to Jonah in total shock later that day. It turns out Chip is adopted too. His parents have kept it a secret from him all this time. The two boys quickly decide that if Chip didn’t even know he was adopted, and no one else they know got a letter, something strange is going on. Maybe it’s something serious. Could the two of them really be missing? Could their birth parents be looking for them? Then they both receive a second letter. It reads, “Beware! They’re coming back to get you.” Jonah doesn’t tell his parents about the letters, but he asks them to call the adoption agency. His parents are put into contact with an FBI agent who might have previously unknown information about Jonah’s adoption. Thus far, this book isn’t science fiction, but that all changes when Jonah and his family visit the FBI agent. They discover that Jonah became an orphan under mysterious circumstances (which are top secret and cannot be revealed). A few minutes later Jonah’s sister sees a person appear and disappear right before her eyes as she sits alone in the office. Katherine sees the mysterious person leave something on the agent’s desk. Katherine takes pictures of the file when no one is looking, and shares them later with Chip and Jonah. In the file were two lists. One titled “Witnesses” and one titled “Survivors.” Chip and Jonah’s names are on the survivors list. Jonah, Chip, and Katherine launch an investigation. By calling the people on the lists they try to discover what it was that Jonah and Chip survived. They arrange a meeting with one of the people on the witness list. She tells them that thirteen years ago she worked in an airport. One night a plane just appeared on the runway out of nowhere. She went to investigate and found thirty six babies on the plane and not one single adult. As soon as the babies had all been removed from the plane, it disappeared again. The FBI covered up the whole story, and sent the babies to adoption agencies around the country. Now, for some unexplained reason, all of the survivors and their adopted families have moved and are living a few miles from Jonah’s home. Someone has orchestrated it so that all of the survivors are together, but who is it? And how did they do it? Why did they do it?

SPOILER ALERT!!! Skip to the last paragraph if you don’t want the ending ruined. If you are a teacher, you might want to read this part because I think it’s what makes this series really interesting. It’s the part that hooked me anyway! The climax of this story happens at a seminar for adopted children. Jonah, Chip, and Katherine know something sinister is probably going on. Why else would there just happen to be a gathering of all the adopted children in the area. It’s too convenient. Whoever “they” are, they’re supposed to be coming back for the survivors, and at the conference gives all those survivors a legitimate reason for all being in the same place at the same time. Jonah, Chip, and Katherine know they are probably being kidnapped, but they want desperately to discover the solution to the mystery, and they feel as if they need to warn the other survivors. The three are trapped in a cave by “the bad guys” and they are finally told the truth. Time travel is possible in the future. The men that have been tracking them down are from the future. All of the survivors are actually missing children from the past. The time traveling baby smugglers went back in time, kidnapped them around the same time that they were said to have either been killed or gone missing, and they were bringing the babies to the future to be adopted. However, the smugglers were intercepted by “the time travel police” (so to speak). There was a sort of crash, and that is why the plane load of babies ended up at an airport in the twenty first century. Believe it or not I still haven’t given everything away! There’s much, much more!

I highly recommend this book to anyone young or old that likes action, mystery, science fiction, or all of the above. Margaret Peterson Haddix has such an easy-to-read style. Her books could be appealing to even reluctant readers, but they aren’t “dumbed down” at all. The only time this book might get a little hard for weaker readers is at the end. The concepts involved in the time travel explanation are complicated, and they might be hard for some readers to understand completely. I even found myself slowing down, so that I could fully comprehend the information. I think the interest level is so high that young readers are likely to just skim by tough concepts and figure them out later. I am really looking forward to the next book in this series. I have already requested it and the third book from the library. In the next book, I know I will read more about Chip’s background, but I hope to find out more about who Jonah is, and where he came from, too. I’m also wondering if there truly is no going back for the main characters. When the story ends, Jonah, Chip, and Katherine have supposedly left the life they knew, and they can never return. They will never see their families or their homes again. I have a gut feeling that isn’t really the case, but then again, I’m always hoping for the nice neat happy ending.