Erin Besser

Dear Mrs. Margaret Peterson Haddix:

Books can change the way people think. They can change lives. They can even make you feel happy, upset, or even frustrated. Among the Hidden changed the way I think and made me feel sympathetic.

Ever since I've read Among the Hidden, I've thought about how lucky we are in America. We have plenty of food, and we don't have many people dying from starvation. In the book, there was a famine, and lots of people were suffering or dying from starvation. At our school we did a program called "Kids Against Hunger", where we raised money to put together meals with dry ingredients for the starving people in Tanzania, a poor African country. In Among the Hidden, the reason the famine occurred was because there was a drought for the longest time. In Tanzania they are a poor country and cannot always grow food successfully.

Now that I know how lucky we are, I realize that you get what you get and you don't throw a fit. Every time I eat and don't consume all of my food, I think about how much we waste every day. And that's a ton of food. Just imagine how many starving people we could feed with all that wasted thrown away food. The reason I chose this book is because it makes me think the way I do about accepting what you have. So thank you, Margaret Peterson Haddix, for making me change my point of view about the world.

Sincerely,
Erin Besser