Tag: our missing hearts

Penguin Press
Genre: Dystopian Fiction
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

Our Missing Hearts is dystopian fiction that feels a little too on the nose. Bird’s mom left when he was nine and he lives with his father who works at a library. They are under strict laws meant to preserve American culture and anyone who strays out of line is punished. Particularly, the authorities target people and art of Asian descent and have even been known to remove children from households deemed anti-American.

When Bird receives a cryptic drawing he knows is from his mother, he begins to dig into what really happened surrounding her leaving and decides to try to find her.

Bird’s story is interspersed with flashbacks told through his mother’s lens that show how America ended up in the place it is at in the present, and how her poetry became seen as rebellious. I wish there had been a bit more depth to her perspective, as it did not feel as fully explored as Bird’s sections did.

The world-building in this book was integrated seamlessly and was detailed enough to understand the landscape the story was taking place in without feeling overwhelming. It was hard not to draw parallels between the corruption and racism illustrated and the real present day. Ng did an excellent job of crafting similarities that were just different enough to seem jarring, but that could also easily relate to the real world.

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