Our Missing Hearts

Bird and his father live in an apartment on the university campus where his dad works.  They have a routine: Bird goes to school, his father goes to work, and they come together for dinner every night.  Bird doesn’t play outside much, and his only friend recently went away, just like his mom.  It’s a quiet life…until mysterious guerilla artworks start appearing on campus.  When Bird realizes each carries words from his missing mother’s poem, he starts a search to find her, but discovers a much more frightening world than he was expecting.

Celeste Ng brings a haunting story to life in her third novel Our Missing Hearts.  Drawing from recent and historic events, Ng builds a utopian world set after a worldwide crisis that threatened the American way of life.  I found parallels between the storyline and much of the discrimination and violence against Asian Americans when COVID first hit in 2020.  I also found parallels between the story and the disappearances of outspoken political critics common in many dictatorships today.  As the author herself discusses in the Note at the end of the novel, Bird’s story isn’t directly the world we live in, but it draws inspiration from so many headlines.

I give Our Missing Hearts 4 out of 5 stars.  This book really struck me as a mother – any time children are removed from their families, it pains me.  It also prompted me to go search for more information on issues like those recounted in the book once I finished reading.  I appreciate the references to other books the author included in the Note to help direct readers to learn more.  The only reason this book received 4 out of 5 stars was a punctuation choice by Ng – there are no quotation marks to distinguish dialogue from internal thoughts or narration.  When that type of punctuation is utilized by most of today’s writers, it caused my brain some confusion at times – I had to read pages twice on occasion to make sure I followed what the author intended.

I would recommend this book to readers who have enjoyed Ng’s other works such as Little Fires Everywhere.  While dystopian novels are not my usual choice, I did enjoy this and I think it would be a good choice for other readers who normally shy away from this genre.  This is also a great book club choice – there can be some great discussions around this storyline!

The Girlfriend Book Club chose Our Missing Hearts as the April book for our discussions.  As I mentioned, I wouldn’t have typically picked this up and is yet another great book recommended by my book clubs!  There will be a live discussion of the book on April 18^th – if you’re interested, join us at the book club’s Facebook page to learn more!

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What I’m Reading

• Current print book: Born a Crime, Trevor Noah
• Current audio book: When You Trap a Tiger, Tae Keller
• Book I’m most looking forward to: Spare, Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex