Along with an exciting science-fiction mystery, the story touches on real-world topics such as divorce, grief, abusive relationships, government corruption, and transitioning from elementary to middle school. Maintaining suspense from the beginning to the cliffhanger ending, Haddix builds momentum with short chapters that shift among the three third-person perspectives of the Greystone children.

With the help of new friend Natalie Mayhew, in whose mother’s care they find themselves, they follow a trail of clues and secret codes to an alternate world that connects their mom’s sudden disappearance to their missing doppelgängers. The Greystone siblings realize something is horribly wrong when they find their mom’s phone and laptops left behind at their house.

If that weren’t unsettling enough, the next day their mom insists she must leave on a sudden business trip. A startling news broadcast has reported the kidnapping of three children who, against all odds, share their exact same first names, middle names, and birthdays. Sixth-grader Chess Greystone and his younger siblings, Emma and Finn, discover their widowed mom in shock when they arrive home from school one day. (Apr.When their mom goes missing, three siblings chase her to a parallel world to reunite their family in this first of a new series by Haddix ( Children of Jubilee, 2018, etc.). A secret-stacked, thrilling series opener about perception, personal memories, and the idiosyncrasies that form individual identities. In a satisfying third-person narrative that alternates between the children’s experiences, Haddix (the Children of Exile series) portrays the complex anxieties and internal lives of close, caring family members grappling with a single set of extraordinary circumstances-separately and together. It’s up to all three to crack the code and search out answers using nothing but who they are and what they already know. After their mom disappears on a “work trip” the very next day, the Greystones receive a cryptic farewell and a coded letter that makes them wonder if they’re connected to the kidnapped children. Until, that is, the day they find their mother weeping and wan over a news story about three kidnapped Arizona children-children who have not only the same birth dates and unusual names as the siblings but also a mother who looks uncannily similar to their own. In Ohio, the Greystone kids-responsible Chess, math-savvy Emma, and excitable Finn-have established a pleasant life with their mother years after their father’s death.

Haddix the strangers