Beautifully written book about a dystopic future filled with control and hate -- a Handmaid's Tale for the Asian American community. While I loved and care for the characters, I honestly found it too hard to read -- I don't feel it represents a very likely future for the country and it didn't offer any real hope or proposal for how to make things better. I love Celeste Ng's writing but this seemed gratuitously depressing for me.

Celeste Ng's latest is a compelling and brutal telling of a too-real dystopia. The country has been through a difficult and chaotic time of economic crisis and social unrest, which resolves in a government-mandated ordinance called PACT designed to protect American culture. The government prevents social unrest by, among other things, limiting exposure to certain books, and children are separated from parents deemed unfit. The novel deals with topics of anti-Asian violence and families being separated. It is beautifully written but difficult to read.
I love the heartfelt connection between Bird and his parents and the heroic role taken on by librarians and poets. It's a thought-provoking book that will stay with you long after the last page.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Press for the opportunity to read this advance reader copy in exchange for a fair review. This books is to be published October 2022.

Is this the past, present or future? In an America tired of economic crisis after economic crisis, and given our history of blaming ethnic groups for lost jobs, inflation, or whatever trouble is being endured, Ng shows us a country that has let things go too far. What’s terrifying is that this feels all too real, as if the book is a warning for us all.

The country we are told to hate is China. They are the cause of all of our problems. Margaret Miu, a poet and American citizen, is in hiding for fear of being arrested for vague reasons. Her husband and son have lost nearly everything, including her, to eke out a poor existence in Boston. No one wants to be Chinese or give any indication that they are anti-American by speaking out against the brutal policies, as the threat of having your child taken away is ever present. Parents who are sympathizers are unfit to teach their children in these pro-American traditions. Everyone is at risk of that knock on your door. You could say something or not say enough to show your Americanism. Neighbors turn on neighbors. Everyone is being monitored. Margaret sends a cryptic message to her son Bird which starts the page-turning events.

This book hit upon every nerve in my being. As a librarian, I can’t bear to see a world where books are banned and ideas are shunned. As a mom, the concept of my child being taken away because of a neighbor not liking some small thing is terrifying. As a granddaughter of immigrants, I am tense thinking of how my grandparents had to assimilate into a society that hated them, but know that as time passed and their accent softened, they were able to blend because their faces looked like their neighbors. As an American, what could be worse than being monitored and followed and suppressed at every turn because of government policy? As a scholar, I know this reality is not far away and could easily happen if the next election turns bad.

This book is so gripping that I started telling everyone about it within the first chapters. This will be a best seller. This will be done in book clubs. This will be talked about. Thank you Celeste Ng. You’ve done it again.

5*

This book is a quiet, slow burn. It is very well written (no surprise with this author) and makes a lot of points about where society may be headed (and in many ways is already here).

I'm not sure if it's because I'm Canadian or not, but this one didn't really resonate with me. I've just never understood the "rah rah American" mindset so I can't get to a point where a law like PACT could be past. I'm certainly not suggesting Canada is a utopia, but our patriotism just doesn't take the same form.

I'm not a big dystopian reader, so I think this book just wasn't for me.

Fiction? Dystopian? Hard to say. Not all books need to be light and fluffy, and this book is not that at all. Ng weaves a chilling story that sometimes is hard to distinguish what is true and what is fiction. You’ll be thinking about this book long after you’ve finished reading it.

What a beautifully written story that discusses topics that we need to draw more attention to. It was slow reading at times (thus only 4 stars) but that only served to make me consume and savor it like it deserves. This story is so applicable to our times, and I can see it actually happening in the not so distant future. Beautiful beautiful story by an amazing author! A must read!!!!

I believe this is a book that will stay with me for some time. It was well written and scary and dystopian and horrifying all at the same time. I found it eye opening and alarming but so well done.

Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts is one of the best books I've ever read. This book is of-the-moment but bound to be considered a classic, and probably an award winner by this time a year or so from now. Unfortunately, so many elements of this dystopian book are no longer, in 2022, unfathomable: What happens when an entire group of people are the scapegoats for a major economic downturn in the United States? How do talk radio and TV news personalities conspire with lawmakers to point blame and what punishments do they dole out? How do those same forces silence those who oppose them? In the novel, we follow Bird, whose mother has been mysteriously removed from his life, as he navigates the world post-"Crisis"- a world where fidelity to the American culture is prized and everything "other" is dangerous to be associated with. This is an important book, I am am so thankful to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this.

3.5 stars. I love Celeste Ng's books and I really, really wanted to love this one too but it fell short for me. I read this shortly after the Supreme Court decision on Roe vs. Wade and the Uvalde school shooting so perhaps I should have been seeking a more uplifting book for me to read instead of this one. This novel is about hate crimes and laws against Asian Americans in the US and book censorship. It's disturbing because even though this has a dystopian type setting in the near future, these topics are hitting too close to home for me. I thought a lot about this book after I finished it. It is very reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale.

This was a beautifully written book and I would have given it 4 stars but I do not care reading books with no quotation marks. Several times I had to stop and reread sentences/passages and ask myself-is this a thought or are they speaking out loud. I certainly hope this is a short lived fad in publishing because I find it very annoying and it ruins the flow of the story.

Celeste Ng is an author I usually read but this book was just not a good fit for me. The writing is fine but the storyline is one that does not appeal to me. I am not a fan of dystopian fiction so sadly I did not finish. This book will appeal to her many fans and readers of dystopia. I will be looking forward to her next book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this read. All opinions are my own.

I was drawn to this book because of the author, as I've enjoyed her previous books. I was captivated by this story, and found there to be a Handmaid's quality to the post-dystopian world inhabited by Bird and his father. As you're reading it, you're wondering how could this actually happen? And then, when you add up the leading steps described, you begin to see glimpses of what "could be" if all the wrong things aligned. It has similarities to ours, with the fallout occurring after a time of economic hardship where many people suffered. Also somewhat eerie timing as our government recently voted on a PACT act, although in our timeline/universe it's related to veterans and not national security. There are a few descriptions of violence. As a librarian, I found delight in the role libraries and librarians play in the story line. One critique, purely stylistic, is the lack of quotation marks for dialogue. I'd be interested to listen to an audio book, and see if that affects how I read it.

Thank you, NetGalley, for an e-ARC of Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng.
I was excited to get an ARC of Celeste Ng's new novel, but unfortunately, the book fell short for me. The story addresses issues like Asian hate crimes and censorship that will be great for book club discussions and to create empathy among readers. The plot, characters, and setting were well developed and rounded. However, the story moved too slowly, and the ending seemed to lack resolution.

Our Missing Hearts is a dystopian novel that pulls from modern historical events - children taken from families, blind obedience to the state, censorship (I love the role of librarians in the story!!) Great book to be used with a history-English collaboration.

Our Missing Hearts, although fiction, has many underlying truths visible in our society at present that the tone of the entire novel is one of warning and fear. As Celeste Ng states just look at US history and reflect on the many discriminations and abominations that man has caused and endured. It is certainly an enlightening view of life but a frightening one, too.

This book is dystopian set in the near future, so near it feels almost painful. Do we hang by a thread just a whisper from a future like Bird faces?

I adore the idea of underground librarians saving the world! Who better to protect others than those who protect the words? "Words carried secrets, the stories of how they came to be, all their past selves."

People think we're boring, librarians, but we have a most important job - making knowledge available to the minds of students and adults 🤓 And poets are the heartbeat, the lifeblood that keeps the world's heart alive. Poetry, truth, is the ultimate shelter for culture and community. "She does not know if it will make any difference. She does not know if anyone is listening."

Bird is such a great character. Thanks, Celeste Ng, for Bird and his story. Because sometimes words are louder than bombs.

Please read the author's note at the end. "Don't forget our missing hearts."

This is not what I expected, which is likely what we all said upon reading. Disturbing but very timely. Her writing is always very good.

This is a masterful novel that turns our current day world into a dystopian setting reminiscent of a Handmaid's Tale. After America suffers through a pandemic, inflation and a country-wide shutdown the powers that be need to find someone to take the blame for all that has gone wrong. Because China has used America's suffering to grow their own GDP, Asian Americans become the focus of hate and discrimination. Soon laws are passed "for the good of real Americans" that sound eerily close to conversations happening in the US in real life. This is a cautionary tale that needs to be shared and absorbed.

4.5 stars rounded up

A brilliant and quietly devastating dystopian novel from Celeste Ng that, as with her previous novels, centers the Asian American experience.

In a foreseeable future, following an economic and social crisis, the American government has passed PACT, the Preservation of American Culture and Traditions Act, ostensibly about loyalty to America, but In reality, it has marginalized and laid open to persecution, anyone who threatens the imposed patriotic norm. Chinese Americans, and by default all Asian Americans, are targeted because of China, “that perilous, perpetual yellow menace,” and its perceived role in the Crisis.

Ten years after the imposition of PACT, 12 year old Bird and his father, Ethan, are scraping by in Cambridge, MA. Bird’s mother, Margaret Miu, left 3 years ago and Ethan, “a white boy from Evanston,” has been demoted from his academic position at the university to being a library page because of his association with her.

There has been some signs of resistance, but not the usual strikes, marches, and riots. Rather there have been what almost seem like acts of performance art all over the country, only linked by the anti-PACT sentiments and a red heart.

The first section of the novel builds this world for us, through Bird’s eye. When he gets a mysterious letter from his mother, it sets him off on a quest to find her, which he does eventually.

The second section, the one that totally captivated me, is Margaret’s story, from her childhood in a little Rust Belt town with her desperate to conform Chinese American parents, through her years in New York during the Crisis, and then her relationship with Ethan. She tells Bird what she has been doing since she left him: collecting the stories of the families whose children were quietly removed from homes that were considered to be un-American, a nebulous and ever more broadly defined accusation.

Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the author has taken threads from the present and past and knitted them into a scarily possible future. The brilliance of Margaret’s story is how the future crept up from the dark side of the present, how acceptance is really only looking away, and how resistance does not always look like you imagine.

The third section is Margaret’s resistance. As a poet it was her words unknown to her that pulled together the underground movement. Her line of poetry “Our missing hearts” gave the scattered anti-PACT groups words and a symbol to coalesce around.

What does resistance look like? How does it work? In Ms Ng’s future America, it is powerful and quiet. It is art and words, not riots and guns. It is librarians (yay!), poets, journalists, and parents, not politicians or soldiers.

Why not the full five stars? I found myself a little disengaged from Bird’s story. It is deliberately told almost in the manner of a folktale and I felt a slight remove from the characters. For me, this worked much better during Margaret’s section. And, I found myself questioning Margaret’s planned act of resistance: it absolutely fits with the themes of the book and folktale tests and quests but it just stepped out of credibility for a beat for me. Once I started questioning the logistics and plan, it wobbled out of believability

Small quibbles over a marvelous and important book that I will recommend to my English department as well as to students.

Thanks to Penguin and Netgalley for the digital review copy.

Set in the near future after an economic collapse, Asian Americans are targeted for hate crimes and their children (and the children of anyone deemed anti-American) are taken from parents and placed with more "American" families. An underground group, using the slogan of our main character's mother's poem, seeks to reunite those children with their families. Bird begins to investigate his mother, the poet, and her disappearance. Our Missing Hearts is a testimony to the way our country and the communities within it can turn a blind eye to the injustices being perpetrated against our very neighbors. (Bonus: librarians are revolutionaries!)