Book Club April 2024- Our Missing Hearts

By: Celeste Ng
Published Year: 2022
Publisher: Penguin Press
Pages: 335

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Summary (Provided by Goodreads): Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.

What I thought

When this book first came out it was at the top of my list. I even thought about picking it as a book club pick a while back. Then one of my friends started it but didn’t finish it and I got hesitant. I think she didn’t finish it because of timing, not because of dislike for the book, but it just put it lower down my list. So I was excited when Stephanie ended up picking it because it brought it back to the top of my TBR.

Noah/Bird is 12 years old. He lives in the US, but not the same US we know. This US has lived through a Crisis and because of that, there is a new law called PACT which has changed the way the world operates. All books that have any Asian influence have been removed from library shelves and people of Asian descent are at best, looked at warily, at worst, killed. Bird’s mother left the family a few years ago. Suddenly, a not from her shows up at the apartment where he and his dad live. When he figures out her cryptic note, he decides to try to find her.

This book is definitely written as a take on society and what we could become. Similar to how I felt when I first read Station Eleven by Emily St. Mendel years back, this book has stuck with me after reading it. I have found that when certain topics come up or I hear about certain events, I think of how easily the events in this book could happen in real life. And maybe how easily some of them have already happened.

This book is written in 3 parts. I think the first part was my favorite, the second was ok, and I hated the ending. The first part focused mostly on Bird and was told from his perspective. It was interesting to me to see how he interpreted things, given that he had grown up in this world and had never known any different.

When to book switched to part 2, the perspective changed. It felt like when Bird was making comments in the second part he was older and it didn’t feel as young and naiive as it did in the first part. It threw me off a little bit. Admittedly, the content in the second part was probably harder to read, but through the eyes of Bird in the first part it hit me on a deeper level and made me feel more uncomfortable.

Now, this is probably the kind of book I would never be happy with the ending. However, I feel like it needed an Epilogue. I needed to know where the world ended up in 20 years. I understand that Ng’s commentary probably centers on the fact that we wouldn’t know that or that if things ended happily ever after it wouldn’t be as impactful. But I just needed a little more something.

Overall, I think the way that Ng wrote this book and commented on society was done very well. It did the job without feeling like I was being completely whacked over the head with a Message. I am excited to have read this as a book club book because I can’t wait to discuss it and see what everyone felt. I think if you are looking for a book that will make you think, this is definitely going to do that.  

What Book Club Thought

This book was slightly more divisive than I thought it was going to be. One member didn’t finish the book at about 1/3 of the way in, another got about 2/3 of the way in and skimmed the final third, and then 3 of us finished it. We also had 2 members who listened to the story and 3 of us who read a physical copy. Those of us who read the physical copy were all annoyed by the lack of quotation marks. The audiobook readers said it wasn’t their favorite narration.

It was overall, a difficult book to read because of how likely it is to happen in real life and the fact that a lot of these events were based off of things that had actually happened. We had some discussion about that as well as the way the author chose to write about the vents. One member didn’t like how slow the book was. She felt like nothing actually happened. We also talked about how confusing the Crisis itself was. Like how it came about and why it happened the way it did.

I think overall, it’s a really good book club choice. I think it’s a hard book to recommend if you don’t know the reader very well. So if you enjoy dystopian books with political commentary that are not super fast paced, check this one out.