Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
The storyline of Celeste Ng’s newest novel, Our Missing Hearts (Penguin Press), travels uncomfortably close to the bone. In an undefined future, the US is in a troubling place; its citizens are racially divided, tracked and spied upon by government officials, and are often betrayed by neighbors and family. Following a devastating economic depression, referred to, simply, as The Crisis, the country is trying to right itself. But its people have lost their footing.
The authorities work to retain American patriotism while disparaging their biggest worldwide rival: China. Thus, all persons of Asian origin are suspect, and the country is riddled with racist hate and violence. To help Preserve American Culture and Traditions (authorities refer to themselves as PACT), children are taken from questionable families and sent to patriotic foster homes, seditious books are destroyed and the media is redacted.
THE FACE OF A RESOLUTION
Enter Bird. He is 12. His mother, a poet but also a person of Asian origin, has disappeared. He and his father live a quiet life, heads down, voices soft, and they disavow Bird’s mother for fear of being “relocated” themselves. The story is disturbingly familiar. Ng’s take on it, however, is fresh and imaginative.
Bird embarks on a mission to find his mother who has unwittingly become the Avatar of a national protest movement. A phrase from the last line of a poem she wrote has become a rallying cry. Passive-aggressive, ingenious protests crop up overnight and his mother becomes a fugitive.
Readers discover what Bird’s mother has been doing right alongside Bird. Ng scrapes off the veneer of this dystopian society tiny piece by tiny piece until we – and Bird – can see the powder-keg unrest.
A FERVENTLY HEARTFELT STORY
Readers will come to care deeply about Bird’s little family over the course of the story. Ng makes sure we feel the empty ache in his father’s life, the fear and longing in Bird’s heart, the fervor in his friend Sadie’s commitment and the passion behind his mother’s actions.
An accomplished writer, Ng makes her characters three-dimensional, their unspoken thoughts spelled out on the page. A person of Asian origin herself, Ng knows first-hand the damage ethnocentrism can do, and Bird learns it in his travels.
Our Missing Hearts is sweetly inspirational with an edge. The love of a mother for her son, a man for his wife, a child for her lost parents, a friend for a friend — they all burn through the political mess; and Ng’s fine talent for narrative may send new readers back to her earlier books. She writes from the heart.
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About Celeste Ng:
Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts.
Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. It has been translated into over thirty languages and is being adapted for the big screen.
Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon’s Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a Best Book of the Year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and has spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Little Fires Everywhere has been published abroad in more than 30 languages and has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington.
Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, will be published on October 4, 2022.
Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan). Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.
