Margaret is amorphous, less a real character than a political cipher who exists to draw emphatic underlines below all Ng’s real-world parallels. Once we leave Bird’s narration and move into Margaret’s more adult voice, however, Our Missing Hearts begins to falter. It reads like a classic kid’s book you half-recall picking up in the fifth grade. There is something both sweetly old-fashioned and subtly horrific about Bird’s fairy tale-inflected search for his missing mother, his slowly dawning realization that the world in which he lives is deeply flawed. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markīird’s quest powers Our Missing Hearts forward through the first and strongest of its three sections, as he makes his way through secret library networks, hunting down missing books laced with clues. Most urgently, children are taken away from any parent who’s been reported as holding un-American ideas, placed with foster families in faraway cities, and given new names so they never find their way back to their old homes. Books are banned from schools and libraries, then pulped and turned into toilet paper. In Ng’s world, Asian Americans are harassed and attacked in the streets. The resulting society, as all successful dystopias do, bears an unsettling resemblance to our own, retro vocabulary be damned.

In the process of recovering from a vaguely detailed economic meltdown that’s become known simply as “the Crisis,” America has turned on China, and on every “Person of Asian Origin” who might either come from China or be mistaken as having done so. It’s the kind of world where people spend a lot of time worrying over un-American values and threats to the American way of life, where kids are taught to inform on their neighbors, and everyone still rides their bike to school.īut the America of Our Missing Hearts isn’t fretting over secret Russian communists. Our Missing Hearts, the new novel from Little Fires Everywhere author Celeste Ng, takes place in a retro sort of dystopia, a Cold War kid’s nightmare.

The missing hearts