Absolutely blown away by the latest novel by Celeste Ng -- which celebrated its PUB DAY yesterday!

OUR MISSING HEARTS tells the story of a young son, Bird, and his mother. It's set in a dystopian society that honestly doesn't feel so far off or distant from our own...

As Ng explains, "Bird and Margaret's world isn't exactly our world, but isn't not ours, either." A world where children are removed from homes, anti-Asian hate crimes, violent protests, police brutality, and overpowering leadership -- but within all of these heavy topics, comes a moving and lyrical story about unbreakable family bonds, the power of storytelling, and the importance of standing up for the next generation.

This definitely is a thought-provoking read that will leave you wanted to talk about with others -- which is why I am not surprised to see that it's ReesesBookClub October pick.

If you enjoyed Ng's other books, or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Jessamine Chain's A School for Good Mothers, this one is for you!

THANK YOU Penguin Press for an advanced ebook in exchange for an honest review! This book is out NOW :)

Not surprised ONE BIT that this was a Reese’s book club pick! This book is worth all of the hype. Unsurprisingly has a HUGE wait at our library already!

Holy cow, can she write. It’s dark, but not in the way you’d think. It’s nothing like her previous works, but oh how she made it her own!!

It’s literary, it’s historical, and it’s real. She clearly knows what she’s talking about. This book is going to stick with me for a long time.

Wow this was a great book. Lots of parallels to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, so it was no surprise to see that Ms. Ng acknowledgement of that book in the afterward. Ironically, I had just been to an event with Ms. Atwood the night I finished this book. I enjoyed how this book imagines what could happen if we do not stand up for our rights that are under attack today

Happy book birthday to <i>Our Missing Hearts</i>!

*I was given an eARC in exchange for my honest review. Thank you Netgalley!*

I adored [book:Little Fires Everywhere|34273236], so I knew I had to read this new addition to Ng's accomplishments. I expected another complex contemporary drama. I was way off.

One part dystopian, one part criticism, <i>Our Missing Hearts</i> takes the sins of our past (the government taking children away from their parents to force obedience) and applies it to our anxiety of the future. It was written just after the pandemic and the surge of Asian-American hate that followed, playing heavily on American nationalism and what could have been. The story is told through the eyes of a thirteen year old biracial boy desperate to understand why his life has changed and where his mother disappeared to. It's the classic systemic-issues-told-through-the-eyes-of-a-child plot that we all love to read. It's about family, fear, hope, and revolution.

I loved the Ng touched on the child-snatching topic, because it seems to get very little attention in fiction. I do wish she would have included other instances of this playing out in real life in her note at the end - it's way more widespread than you'd think, and it's all too easy to be the one cheering such tragic crimes on. We saw that during COVID.

I also liked the inclusion in little-known folklore, and finally, the ending. As the pages left to read dwindled, I knew there wasn't much hope for it to play out the way I wanted it to. The way it actually did felt appropriate.

“Our Missing Hearts,” by Celeste Ng, Penguin Press, 352 pages, Oct. 4, 2022.

This is set in a dystopian near future in which Asian Americans are regarded with scorn and mistrust. Under the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, authorities are allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin.

Noah Gardner is 12. He lives with his father, Ethan Gardner, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard University’s library. Noah was called Bird until his mother left three years ago. Bird knows not to stand out too much.

Libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet. Bird’s father even burned her books. Margaret wrote a poem that became a rallying cry for those protesting PACT.

Students have to recite the PACT pledge at the start of every school day. Bird’s best friend, Sadie Greenstein, lives with foster parents because her parents were dissidents. Then Sadie disappears. Under PACT, protests are banned. But lately, weird stunts aimed against PACT have been happening. Bird and his father see a sign that reads “Bring back our missing hearts.”

Out of the blue, Bird receives a letter. There is nothing in it except a drawing of cats. Since the letter was addressed to Bird, he believes it is from his mother. Bird decides to find her. He keeps seeing “missing hearts” messages. Bird’s journey will take him back to the folktales she told him as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken.

“Our Missing Hearts” is about how some people become afraid of others. But the underlying story is about parents love for their children. In the author's notes Celeste Ng writes, “Bird and Margaret's world isn't exactly our world, but it isn't not ours, either." This is easily one of the best novels of the year. It is powerful, beautifully written and deeply moving.

In accordance with FTC guidelines, the advance reader's edition of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a review.

Our Missing Hearts it's a deeply touching, thought provoking, emoton evoking dystopian read. As always, Ng delivers a character driven story filled with complex characters and a plot so captivating you cannot forget about it.

A story about love and family, about the actions we take in life and the impact our choices have on others. A story about injustices and yet somehow a story of strength and hope.

This book leaves you with a lot to think about. A lot. And I already think about re-reading and annotating every page of this book.

This is one of the most anticipated inspiring novels this year. Everything Celeste wrote is depicted for the future, but is being played out before our eyes. We live in a broken world crowded by economic instability and violence. As the tragic grimness runs through your mind, so does the fear of history repeating itself and what we pass down to the next generation. This is well described as "a mother's unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear".
Margaret, a Chinese American poet and mother must leave her home to protect her son, Bird, from being removed from the home and relocated because of her resistance in the law PACT, which protects the American Culture and disregards anyone else's beliefs that is considered unhealthy or unpatriotic to America. Everything from the internet to books are censored and a strict inequality in surveillance is placed on those in resistance. Books are removed, but not burned as they were in Ray Bradbury's dystopia Fahrenheit 451 or the Nazi removal of books like Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, instead they are turned to pulp and used as toilet paper. Some books are placed in an underground library network, such as Margaret's poetry about racial injustice and is part of the hidden contraband. Her poetry reaches out to the world at how America got to this point, which brings us back to our presence of police brutality, hate, and bigotry.
Bird is 9 years old when his mother leaves him and his father. His story is told in innocence at 12 years old, which is too young to know what is going on. One of his closest friends, Sadie, is pulled from the home and put into foster care because her family was not teaching her the "American Culture". Bird's father told him to hide his own Asian origin and keep his head down.

As a librarian, we see the nation banning books and voicing it as protecting the "American Culture". What's next? Children have been pulled from their mother's arms and placed in "government care" as they crossed the border hoping for a better life. We are not immune from this thought provoking novel that represents hope and truth at its finest. Outstanding, Celeste Ng! I need to step back and cry.
I encourage this book to be for everyone. "Books feed the soul" and I am thankful I read it.
Thank you NetGalley and PENGUIN GROUP The Penguin Press for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Celeste Ng is absolutely brilliant. I really enjoyed this book. This story is so important given the current state of the world. I'm not the biggest fan of dystopian, which I think effects my rating, but I think this book is going to find it's audience in a really big way.

Celeste Ng’s latest novel “Our Missing Hearts” speaks to anti-Asian violence and discrimination, child separation, book banning, and a culture of surveillance, a dystopian version of the United States set in the not-too-distant future, a future that is all too visible from here.

It’s also the story of a boy named Bird, determined to find his missing mother, Margaret Miu, a dissident poet whose work inspires resistance to the authoritarian regime. Margaret disappeared voluntarily, in hopes of preventing Bird from being separated from both his parents and “re-placed” in a different family. It’s been years since Bird saw her and finally, a mysterious letter arrives that must be, can only be from her.

Bird’s father, a former professor who is no longer allowed to teach, has instructed him to tell people that they have nothing to do with Margaret, that she is out of their lives. He insists that Bird be called by his given name Noah and not his mother’s special nickname for him. But Bird is determined to look for her before all his memories of her fade away. With meager clues, he runs away, unsure if he will find Margaret but certain that he needs to try.

Ng is adept at creating small moments that touch the reader’s heart: Bird, breathing in the old book smell of the library as he runs his fingers over the book spines; Margaret, patiently creating tiny sites of resistance; Bird’s friend Sadie, wrapped in a towel after a shower when strangers come to remove her from her own home. These make the larger ideas in the book so much more immediate and personal.

The power of words and stories is a deep thread throughout the book. Libraries have been stripped of their histories and other works that sound threatening to those in power. Some remain in academic libraries like the one in which Bird’s dad works as a library assistant. But they are restricted and only researchers whose work has been pre-approved can access them. Still, in a nod to the role libraries play in freedom of expression, Ng gives librarians a secret role to play in the resistance.

“Our Missing Hearts” is a departure for Ng, whose previous books deal with Asian-American characters in more traditional family dramas. This dystopian novel is the book we need now though, before it’s too late. I highly recommend “Our Missing Hearts” and will purchase it for my library. I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is easily my new favorite book by Celeste Ng!! I am a sucker for a good dystopian novel and this book gave me all the best Handmaid's tale/Farenheit 451 vibes!

While fiction, this book was steeped in realism, drawing on anti-Asian movements and banned book culture. Anyone who loves a story about the power of mother's love, underground movements and helping reunite removed children with their parents will need to get the tissues handy!

I enjoyed how the story was told through the eyes of young Bird, a biracial Asian American boy who is living in this new, stricter America with his father and has very few memories of his activist mother who authored the banned story "Our missing hearts."

Over the course of the book, we get to discover more about what happened in the past and where Bird's mother is now. Amazing on audio narrated by Lucy Liu with an author interview included at the end.

I'm so happy for Celeste Ng to be the first two-time Reese Book club pick too! Thought-provoking and full of heart, this is a story you won't soon forget after finishing! Much thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy and Libro.fm for an ALC in exchange for my honest review!

On my! What an eye opener of a book. Ng once again writes about race relations and how Asian Americans are treated and viewed. Set in a time where the nation has adopted a PACT that dictates undying national loyalty and turns Americans against each other and separates children from their families in the name of preserving our culture and traditions. How scary to think about our country if we go too far in not allowing for diversification and individualism.

This book is about to start some serious discussions. Reese Witherspoon has chosen it as the October 2022 book club title, so lots of people will discover this fictional treasure. Although Our Missing Hearts is fiction, it’s easy to see how current news and historical events have done grave damage to innocent people. Celeste Ng has written an important book which I hope many readers will embrace.

I think this is the first book where I truly felt the depth of COVID's influence on fiction, I'm very interested to see if this trend continues in Ng's future works

This book was very well written and also hard to read. It is a depressing look at a futuristic dystopian USA where people are under watchful eyes on the chance you are caught being Anti-American. There is strong discrimination against Asian Americans and China in general, and the brutality against any Asian is written off. In this world, children are taken from parents if they are accused of these Anti-American views and are never returned. The main character is a young boy who lives with his father but his mother was removed from the house due to her Chinese heritage and her published work of poetry which is misconstrued as Anti-American. He goes on a quest to find her and when he does, is surprised at what he sees. I couldn't decide if this book was trying to manipulate the reader into believing that our world was on the brink of this nightmare. It seemed very 1984 meets Handmaid's Tale.

Celeste Eng has written her most ambitious book yet: an American dystopia set in the near future that nudges the boundaries of horror by virtue of being all too plausible. With the eye of an experienced surveyor, she again explores the territory of abandonment, a constant in her previous books, though this time, in addition to family and friendship ties/bonds, it also covers the abandonment of a country to it’s democratic ideals. The force largely responsible for doing this is the government mandated PACT, The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. Its provisions, taught to all schoolchildren, include “Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior. Encourages all citizens to report potential threats to our society. Protects children from environments espousing harmful views.” PACT originated after an economic crash devastated the country, which spiraled into chaos and the disintegration of social order, with finger pointing gradually settling on China for America’s reliance on its products, its commerce, and its global markets. This gave rise to a systemic and virulent anti-Asian bias, cloaked in patriotism and self-righteousness. Sound familiar? Eng knows we might already be on this terrain, she is just a bit further down the road. It is frightening and we are unable to look away.

What makes it especially compelling is that this is seen through the eyes of a preternaturally sensitive child, 12 year old biracial Bird, aka Noah (both names are heavily weighted with symbolism), who lives in a cold student dorm with his father, a former language professor, now demoted to a university library shelver. His father’s survival strategy, which he insists Bird follow is to keep his head down and become invisible. Bird (has a lonely life, he follows his father’s rules, is bullied for his Asian features by other students and also, to a degree, his teachers. He is both angry with and grieving for his missing Chinese mother, Margaret, who walked out of their lives 3 years ago. Margaret, a poet, is considered a dangerous revolutionary, for lines in a poem she wrote years ago about the scattered seeds of a pomegranate which has become the rallying cry for a protest against PACT. More specifically, “our missing hearts” has become a symbol, for the practice of removing children from the homes of those deemed unpatriotic and unfit to raise children, which effectively encompasses anyone that speaks out or comments against any government policy or practice. Bird’s one outspoken friend Sadie, bounces between foster homes after being suddenly taken from her parents because of their anti-PACT journalism. And then she is gone and Bird receives a strange cartoonish drawing in the mail with a tantalizing clue, which leads Bird on a harrowing quest to find his mother.,

As with Ng’s other books, character development, heavily vested in the inner life, is slow, deliberate, and assured; it is near impossible to not become intricately bound up with the fates of those she writes about.
Another strength is that for the most part, the villainy remains faceless. Terrible things happen to innocent people, the consequence of a well-oiled machine of fear, hatred, and jingoism, but without creating a face and personality for the powers behind PACT, it is insidious, ubiquitous and devastating. But a counter movement is afloat, which harnesses art as it’s messenger-streets painted red; sculptures of hearts, trees covered in red yarn and strung up with knit children dolls. The acts of artistic rebellion are treated like crime scenes and a counterpoint to the God Bless All Loyal American signs displayed on every business. Even stopping to long to look at it is suspect.

Eng expertly parrots the necessary mindspeak used to buttress this regime: “PACT is not about race, the president was always saying, it is about patriotism and mindset.” Her lazar sharp satiric writing is so full of fire and fury that it is easy to forget that Eng is talking about a fictional construct, though one, that could perhaps come to pass or whose beginnings might already be present in the recent wave of crime and violence directed to the Asian community. As Bird comes closer to finding what he is looking for, though a series of sometimes improbable clues and coincidences, involving libraries and librarians, the story shifts to Margaret’s voice. Margaret is a poet and her voice and thoughts and imagery while stirring, also changes the pace of the narrative. It circles back on itself, often covering the same terrain and sometimes stalls in a series of beautiful though repetitive observations. The chase is on for Bird and Margaret and the tension alternates between Bird’s bird’s eye view of events and Margaret’s anguished conflict between her duty as a long-absent mother and that of a symbol of political protest in a most dangerous time. Can art save us?
Eng asks many uncomfortable and essential questions in this powerhouse of a book. During the course of the novel, you may find your answer changes more than once. My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for an advance copy

Celeste Ng is probably one of my favorite literary authors writing today, as her style and aesthetics and descriptors really speak to me. I wasn't sure what to expect of OUR MISSING HEARTS, and once I was reading it I realized that it was even more off the beaten path of my expectations, but in a good way. Set in a world that is kind of like ours, but not quite, this book is a dystopian America where China has become a daunting superpower, a vague Crisis rocked American society ten years previously, and Asian Americans are targeted for hate and scorn because of both facts. But as we follow our protagonist Bird as he searches for the Chinese American mother who supposedly abandoned him, and whose poem became a rallying cry for resistors, we see a novel that is as much about love and identity and hope as much as it's about a bleak dystopian America that feels all too realistic. Ng jumps into a newish genre pretty well, and while it wasn't what I expected, I ended up enjoying it.

OUR MISSING HEARTS is sure to be on many end of year lists, and it's great seeing that Celeste Ng still knows how to surprise readers.

Another must-read story from the talented Celeste Ng
Thought-provoking, moving, and engrossing, OUR MISSING HEARTS will hopefully kick off a conversation about what it means to be American and the powers of a mother's love.

I couldn't put this book down. The US described in Ng's latest is frightening and all too easily imagined. I recommend highly and will be sharing Our Missing Hearts in an upcoming book talk. Thank you to NetGalley for the advance e copy.

This is a terrifying peak into the past, present, and future of many societies who seek to keep us divided & fearful of each other. It’s also a beautiful story of love between parents and their children. I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a bit of hope.

“But in the end every story I want to tell you is the same. Once upon a time, there was a boy. Once upon a time there was a mother. Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his mother loved him very much.”

Our Missing Hearts, at its core, is a story about a mother’s (Margaret) love for her child (Noah/Bird) and the internal conflict she has between keeping safe and making sacrifices to do the right thing.

It is a heavy read, about a dystopian world, that is quite real in many ways. A world full of hate, fear, prejudice and distrust. Where government control goes too far in the name of protection and security. To a point where children are taken from families for their protection. It is so dark because of its real life potential.

The first half of the book is Bird’s path toward searching for his mother who suddenly left his family several years earlier. The second half is Margaret’s story. It’s a sudden shift. It could really almost be two different books. The shift is important though, as it is a build up to Margaret’s project and purpose as a voice.

I loved the role of librarians in this world as the quiet, under the radar heroes of information sharing. It was perfection!

Ng writes beautifully. Many parts ripped my gut, especially the stories Margaret shares. The book doesn’t pull any punches. There is a lot to think about, and it is ripe for discussion, but it leaves you feeling very sad about our future and it is tough to get through.

I both read the book and listened to the audio. Lucy Liu’s voice is absolutely haunting as the narrator and adds much to the experience.