Celeste Ng: Our Missing Hearts

“Our Missing Hearts” is Celeste Ng’s heartbreaking novel about injustice, power and the deep love between a mother and a child in a society of fear.

In “Our Missing Hearts” by Celeste Ng’s we follow the young boy Bird Gardner. He lives with his caring but broken father, who works in Harvard’s library. Bird knows he has far too many questions and stray too far away. In a time of violence and economic instability the government tries to protect the “American culture” and has the right to relocate children of dissidents, particular those with Asians backgrounds, and the libraries has removed books seen as unpatriotic – including the works by Bird’s mother, Margaret. She is a Chinese American poet who left her family when Bird was only nine. Bird has never cared for her poems, and he doesn’t why she left and what happened to her. But then one day he receives a mysterious letter with a puzzling drawing, and he sets out to find her. His search leads him to an underground network of librarians and to New York, where a defining fight for a new beginning awaits.