Our Missing Hearts by Celeste NgMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
With a mad king running the world’s most powerful democracy, it is hard not to slip into doom and gloom. One of the ways I deal with it is by reading books about political resistance, the underground, and dystopias. (See, for example, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and the two books I mentioned here.) My latest such read is Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng. It tells the story from the perspective of young Bird (aka Noah), whose mother goes missing as a result of her underground resistance activities.
The novel didn’t pull me along as swiftly as her 2nd novel, Little Fires Everywhere, but it was still a good book, especially if you are interested in near-future dystopias. Twelve-year old Noah, who still thinks of himself as Bird – the nickname his Chinese-American mother gave him before her disappearance three years earlier – is living a quiet life with his father in a college dorm. It’s not much of a life, but it’s a way to survive and keep a low profile under an autocratic regime that is known to seize the children of dissidents and “reassign” them to its supporters. The regime had gained power partially by blaming all ills on Asian immigrants, which puts half-Asian, Bird, at particular risk.
Bird longs to see his mother again, and when he gets a cryptic message apparently from her, he is determined to track her down. My grandfather, who was a Russian socialist revolutionary in his youth, once said that “you can be a revolutionary or a family man; not both.” During the course of Bird’s risky quest to find his mother, we come to appreciate the difficult trade-offs revolutionaries must make, especially those who have families.
That said, I found the second part of the book, which is more from the mother’s perspective than Bird’s, moved surprisingly slowly. It was clear she had always loved her son, but I never got a strong emotional sense of why she felt that it was worth abandoning him for the cause. To me, it felt too detached. As is so often the case when I write reviews, I wish Goodreads had a 10 point system instead of 5. I’d give this a 7/10 or 3.5/5, but that’s not an option. On balance, I think it is good enough to round up.
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