Fiction Review: Our Missing Hearts

Book By Book

My first book read in the new year was a Christmas gift from my son and his girlfriend, Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. I had never read anything by this author and really wanted to give her a try. This latest novel of hers has a scary real-life dystopian setting but with a lot of heart and a touch of hope.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives with his father in a dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his dad works as a librarian. Bird is half-Chinese, and his father his white. His dad used to be a professor of linguistics, but after Bird’s mother left, his dad lost his position and they left their house with the wonderful garden his mom had planted. Bird’s real name is Noah, and everyone calls him that now, but in his head, he’s still Bird. His mother left suddenly and without warning three years ago, and Bird doesn’t know why, only that a book she wrote had been banned. His father gives him strict instructions to walk straight home from school each day, following the route he outlined, with no detours or stops. In spite of this, sometimes Bird notices strange things, like the street in front of their dorm painted red overnight, or a group of maples on the common yarn-bombed, dripping with red yard and a sign reading “Our Missing Hearts.” One day, a letter arrives addressed to Bird, and he knows it must be from his mother, since no one else calls him that. There’s no return address, just a New York, NY postmark, and nothing inside but a single sheet of paper, covered with drawings of cats: sitting cats, sleeping cats, playing cats, cats–big and small–all over the page. It tickles an old memory in Bird’s mind, and he struggles to retrieve it. As Bird begins to investigate the meaning of the letter and where his mother may have disappeared to, helped by a local librarian, it sets him off on a perilous journey to find out what happened to his mother.

I haven’t described much about the world that Bird lives in, a near-future dystopia with chilling connections to what’s happening in our own world, because the book is written from his perspective. As Bird slowly figures out what is happening in the wider world and all that his father has protected him from, the reader comes along on that journey of discovery. From Bird’s school assignments, answering questions and writing essays about a law called PACT, to the art-based protests Bird witnesses to the way that people treat him, Bird eventually begins to put the pieces together, all leading him back toward his mother. Bird is a wonderful main character and guide to this changed world so like our own. His innocence and his love for his mother guide his actions, and we get to come along. It’s a heartbreaking story of a society that has lost its way and is now led by fear, but it is also a beautiful, moving story of the power of the mother-child bond and of art to guide change. I was completely immersed in Bird’s world and was rooting for things to turn out OK for him and his family. While frightening in its connections to our own world and elements that we see today in society, there is a thread of hope in the ending, and I loved the role that librarians play in that hope!

331 pages, Penguin Books

Penguin Audio

This book fits in the following 2024 Reading Challenges:

Mount TBR Challenge (starting the year off right!)

Motif Challenge – “Red Carpet Reads” (award nominee or winner) – Booklist Editor’s Choice award

Alphabet Soup Challenge – O

Diversity Challenge

Literary Escapes Challenge – Massachusetts 

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/or download it from Audible. Audio is read by Lucy Liu and sounds great!

Or get this audiobook from Libro.fm and support local bookstores (audio sample here, too).

Print and e-book from Amazon.

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)–the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!