Our Missing Hearts
-
-
3.6 • 11 Ratings
-
-
- £9.99
Publisher Description
From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, a deeply heart-wrenching novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear.
Read by award-winning actress Lucy Liu, with an author's note read by Celeste Ng.
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard's library. He knows not to ask too many questions, stand out too much, 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 drawn into a quest to find her.
His journey will take him through 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, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can turn a blind eye to the most searing injustice. It's a story about the power - and limitations - of art to create change in the world, the lessons and legacies we pass onto our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Celeste Ng’s knack for tense family drama is given a dystopian overlap for her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, made all the more emotionally hollowing by the fact that the future Ng imagines for 12-year-old Bird and his family is more of a reimagining—something that has happened before, is still happening now in certain parts of the world, and increasingly feels like will happen again very soon. The “missing hearts” of the title refer to the children removed from their families under the authority of a national security law called PACT, which disproportionately targets Asian-American and other minority communities. Taken from a line in a poem, “our missing hearts” has inspired the rallying cry for revolutionaries pushing back against the fascist regime, and Bird’s mother, the poet who authored it, is forced to leave her family behind when Bird is nine years old, to protect them from the repercussions of being connected to the protests. The story follows Bird’s attempts to find his mother and Ng writes about the heartbreak of family separation with devastating intuition, weaving in the additional tremors of racism, police brutality and the suffocating oppression of life under draconian rule. Profoundly beautiful, achingly melancholy and impossible to forget once you put it down.
Customer Reviews
*Moving & Bittersweet
This story was moving, I was engrossed straight away. It’s about a 12 year old boy nicknamed ‘Bird’ by his mother. She is a Chinese/American poet and his father is a former linguist who now works in a library. Bird’s mother disappeared 3 years before without trace and Bird is not at peace with her decision. He cannot understand it but settles into a pretty quiet existence with his father.
They live under a draconian type of rule that the country ban what they like and even his mother’s poetry books are banned. Chinese children are being removed from homes without notice or they are targeted. So in order to keep the peace Bird and his father comply.
Bird is still curious and as his father never discusses his mother so he decides to try and find out more. He receives a cryptic note that he recognises is from his mother.
The story did drag a little for me in parts but it picked up again as Bird’s quest to find out the whereabouts of his mother.
Is he going on a wild goose chase? Will he ever find out the reason why his Mother left. We also see what the consequences are of decisions made for the greater good