Or even those still suffering the fallout of the pandemic, both emotional or economic.īird and his father Ethan are living in a world slightly different than our own. There’s good reason why this book is yet again a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, and I’m sure this story will resonate with lots of people, especially those who have had children, or those who have lost someone. I don’t mind remember being wowed by it, but her latest release, Our Missing Hearts is definitely a new favourite of mine.

It’s a story about the power-and limitations-of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact.I’ve only read one other Celeste Ng book, you can find the review here. Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. 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. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. 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.īird 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. 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. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. 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’s library.

From the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear

Our missing hearts a novel reviews