Margaret Peterson Haddix (born April 9, 1964) is an American author. She is best known for writing The Missing (Haddix) series and the Shadow Children series. She has written over 20 children/young adult novels since 1995. Most of her works are science fiction/fantasy.
Works with TV Tropes pages:
- Running Out of Time (1995)
- Shadow Children (1998-2006)
- Just Ella (1999)
- Double Identity (2005)
- The Missing (Haddix) (2008-2015)
- Into the Gauntlet (2010), book 10 of The 39 Clues series
Other works contain examples of:
- Death by De-aging: In Turnabout, elderly people are given a de-aging treatment. While they don't know exactly what will happen when they de-age to zero, the tests suggest this trope.
- Foregone Conclusion: Uprising, a historical novel inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, starts with a ten years later, with a young woman coming to one of the main characters and asking about the strike, and the fire. Due to inner monologue, it's revealed that two of the three narrators of the book end up dead. But it still packs a wallop when reading the death scenes.
- God Before Dogma: Dorry Stevens in Leaving Fishers, who rejects her old creepy Christian cult but still believes in God and values religion, as opposed to fellow escapee Zachary, who says that religion is evil.
- Longevity Treatment: In Turnabout, the government is working on a top-secret experiment to reverse the aging process. And it works — the main characters, who were extremely elderly and would have died before long, are given the chance to grow young again. Unfortunately, they haven't figured out a working way to stop the un-aging, and there are also memory-related side effects.
- Merlin Sickness: Turnabout is about two girls who, as old women, underwent an experimental treatment which caused them to age backwards, losing their memories as they go: at each birthday aging in reverse, they lose all memories of that year of age.
- No New Fashions in the Future: Lampshaded in Turnabout. The two heroines, who have been reverse-aging since they were centenarians in the year 2000, are now in their mid-teens hanging out in a club in the 2080s when the book begins. One of them remarks how fashion seems to continuously go through the same 40-year cycle, and that currently, 1970s fashions are back in style again. But that would suggest that '70s fashions were remarkably like that of the 1930s, and that was not so.
- Rapid Aging: Turnabout has a scene of this. The protagonists are given an a drug to reverse the aging process and then a second was to have stopped it altogether at a given age. But, the second drug causes those who take it to age in death in seconds.
- Scam Religion: Leaving Fishers is about a girl who joins a cult called Fishers of Men. Among the many other things wrong with it, one thing she finds out at the end when she de-coverts is that the head of the cult is using their donations to support a lavish lifestyle, while making it out as though he can barely afford things.
