If you are concerned at all as to the direction this nation is going, you should read this fiction book. It's a bit too eerily like what we have been experiencing here in the USA. What a brilliant author! I really enjoyed her first novel Little Fires Everywhere. I have not read her 2nd novel, Everything I Never Told You.
STORY SUMMARY
Bird (aka Noah) Gardner is 12 years old. He lives with his father Ethan in a university dorm in Cambridge (Boston area), MA. His father is a quiet but broken man. He's a former linguist who now just shelves books at the university library. His father loves him. His father misses Bird's mother. Bird has learned to not ask questions or to stand out too much when in public. He has also learned to not stray far behind his neighborhood and he even has a specific route his father has taught him to use to get to and from school. He misses his home. He misses his mother.
For the last 10 years, Ethan and Bird have had their lives governed by some laws that were written to preserve "American culture" due to the years of economic instability and violence. This new law is called the PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions). It comes after The Crisis.
To keep the peace and bring back prosperity to the nation, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents. Most especially, children of Asian origin. Libraries have been forced to remove books that are deemed "unpatriotic". This includes the book that Bird's mother, Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet, had written several years earlier. She had to leave the family when Bird was just 9 years old and Bird has never been told why. Also, the only real friend he ever had, a girl his age named Sadie, has now disappeared.
Bird is now 12 when the story opens and he has disavowed his mother for the last 3 years. He doesn't know her work or what happened to her. He does know that he shouldn't wonder about it all. And then one day he receives a very mysterious letter. It's a page of cat drawings. All kinds of cats in all kinds of positions. With a very small rectangle at the bottom. No words. The only clue that might help is the post mark: NYC, NY. Bird is now drawn into finding his mother based on some clues he discovers regarding the cats. He is on a quest.
His journey will take him back to remembering the many folktales his mother used to tell him. One involved cats. He makes his way through a group of underground librarians on his search for his mother. He discovers that these people are trying to help locate the all the missing children. This is done with codes on slips of paper tucked inside books. Finally, Bird makes his way to New York City, where a new act of defiance might be the beginning of much needed change for the city and country.
MY THOUGHTS
This book is one powerful novel. I liked what was written in the description on the inside jacket cover: "Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It's a story about power---and limitations---of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact."
The main theme in this story seems to be social injustice, particularly discrimination/racism. Other themes include missing children, hate crimes, surveillance, parenthood, friendship, art, the power of storytelling, the power of love.
One thing I found very interesting that the author chose to do: there are no quotation marks with the conversation, there's a type of blurring the conversations between the spoken words of the characters and their thinking, and there's no chapter numbers. There are 3 parts to this book and each part has "sections" but no titles or chapter numbers.
The Covid Pandemic isn't mentioned outright, nor is the attack on Capitol Hill, but the way the author describes "the Crisis" is part pandemic, part economic turmoil and part book banning, discrimination, and outlawing anything or anyone who goes against the "norm". It takes on a tone of racism against Chinese Americans as well as other Asian groups. Freedom of expression is banned in this new PACT law. It's a little bit dystopian. Until you read our current news. (in my opinion!)
The author has called this story "Scarily real".
There were a couple of quotes that jumped out at me:
"Margaret listened. She began to learn: there was no new thing under the sun. About the schools where Indigenous children were shorn and stripped, renamed, reeducated, and returned home broken and scarred----or never at all. About children borne across borders in their parents' arms only to be caged in warehouses, alone and afraid. About foster children pinballed from home to home, their own families sometimes unable to track their path. Things she'd been able to not know, until now. There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same. A most precious ransom, a cudgel over a parent's head. It was whatever the opposite of an anchor was: an attempt to uproot some otherness, something hated and feared. Some foreignness seen as an invasive weed, something to be eradicated." (pg 238, Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, c. 2022)
"When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth, warming them again with your heat.......Who ever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?" (pg. 302)
This book is important.
If you care at all about where this nation is headed, read this story. Although it is fiction, it is all too real.
In my opinion, this book is appropriate for ages 14 and older.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, I rate this a 10.
1 comment:
I have this book on my to read piles, found it in a Free Little Library. Hopefully I'll get to it this year.
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