Margaret didn’t dwell on those external threats, though, preferring to focus on “her poems, her garden, her husband. He treasured and marveled at her, and she grew calm in his presence, loving the stillness and “the way he handled her, like butter to be licked off a finger.” When they were able to shut out the world together, poems came to Margaret “like timid animals emerging after a storm.” With days consumed by work and child-rearing, the life the couple crafted for themselves and Bird was a sanctuary even as turmoil propagated outside their doors. Though she had been raised to conform (according to her Chinese immigrant parents, “To be noticed was to invite predation better to blend seamlessly into the foliage”), she’d thrown off that advice, moving to New York City, where “no one noticed you.Which meant you could do anything, be anything.”Īs an adult, Margaret defied everything she’d been taught, resolving that “if the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright.” Ethan was her opposite: a cautious, squarish, white Midwesterner. When Margaret first met Ethan, she was a bike messenger and a poet.
In flashbacks, we learn who Bird’s parents were before him and how they fell so completely in love. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
What’s really happened to Bird’s family and others is the novel’s central mystery. His father, Ethan-a former linguist now relegated to shelving books in a library-is broken, but not for the reasons Bird thinks. In a near-future, quasi-dystopian, and increasingly authoritarian America, a 12-year-old nicknamed Bird goes on a quest for his mother, Margaret, who disappeared from his life without explanation three years prior. It shares some literary DNA with The Handmaid’s Tale. Our Missing Hearts treads a similar line between literary fiction and social thriller, but this time with a more prominent political through line. Her 2014 debut, Everything I Never Told You, topped best-books lists, and her second novel, the number one bestseller Little Fires Everywhere, made an even bigger cultural splash: It was turned into a much-talked-about Hulu series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. With two stellar prior novels, numerous short stories, and a Guggenheim Fellowship to her credit, Ng has quickly become a leading chronicler of modern American angst, race, and class. But the tale is also shot through with vivid color and rising hope, an unflinching yet life-affirming drama about the power of art and love to push back in dangerous times. Can storm clouds have silver linings? Celeste Ng’s politically charged Our Missing Hearts is a dark landscape on which anti-Asian hate, book bannings, family separation, and other forms of oppression rage.
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