Celeste Ng’s dystopian America is milder [than other dysopias], which makes it more believable — and hence, more upsetting ... Firmly written and well executed ... Because Ng’s storytelling is so calm — serene, almost — the occasional explosions of violence are authentically horrifying ... I won’t give away the splendid conclusion of Ng’s book; suffice it to say, the climax deals with the power of words, the power of stories and the persistence of memory ... There are peculiar lapses that must be noted. Covid-19 doesn’t exist in Our Missing Hearts, although there can be no doubt that the pandemic has given rise to dark conspiracies having to do with Wuhan Province ... Ng likewise ignores social media ... Ng succeeds in spite of these occasional blind spots, partly because her outrage is contained and focused, and mostly because she is often captivated by the very words she is using.
... saddled by grief. But it is also propelled by hope, less a grim prognosis of the future than an impassioned call for a full reckoning with the past ... Thanks to its seamless structure, Our Missing Hearts resembles a box of myths transmuting into fresh, symbiotic insights when converged ... Ng's clever juxtaposition of the Orpheus myth (a beloved's eternal absence transformed into art) with the Japanese cat myth (an artist's triumph over evil) sums up the tragedy/hope duality at the heart of Our Missing Hearts. As well, her mesmerizing storytelling 'keeps to the small,' by conjuring finely drawn Asian Americans characters and dismantling their stereotypical portrayal as conformists or lacking in emotional complexity ... Celeste Ng's latest work depicts life-like Asian Americans who hope to make peace with the past and change the future by taking small, self-assured steps.
... suspenseful ... Ng unflinchingly depicts acts of racism, family fragmentation and the violence seamed into American identity. Ng’s book is also an homage to librarians who are the vanguard of resistance to PACT ... Ng excels at narrative tension and at mustering readers’ fear and outrage. Bird emerges as an authentic boy; other characters are sketchier. The plot relies on coincidence. And on improbabilities: How did Bird’s very young parents afford a three-bedroom house in Cambridge, even in a depressed market? ... Nevertheless, All Our Missing Hearts is both a powerful reflection and grim augury. PACT evokes documented abuses of the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act. Ng is warning of further censorship, family separation and targeted murders. Like George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro and Octavia E. Butler, Ng pays close enough attention to write tomorrow’s headlines.
Stunning ... One of Ng’s most poignant tricks in this novel is to bury its central tragedy...in the middle of the action. This raises the narrative from the specific story of a confused boy and his defeated father to a reflection on the universal bond between parents and children ... Our Missing Hearts will land differently for individual readers. One element we shouldn’t miss is Ng’s bold reversal of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It is the drive for conformity, the suppression of our glorious cacophony, that will doom us. And it is the expression of individual souls that will save us.
Has the feel of a YA crossover novel ... [The] ingenious plotline alone about librarians as resistance fighters is enough to garner Our Missing Hearts a whole lot of love from readers ... But it's in the second section of this novel, a flashback, where we learn how what's called the crisis happened in America, where Ng's writing becomes richer and her story more disturbing in its near familiarity ... Our Missing Hearts reflects our headlines back to us. But it also powerfully and persuasively offers hope for changing those headlines. In a final moving turn, the novel dramatizes how bearing witness through art and simply speaking up can melt indifference. That sounds sentimental, I know, but Ng's own masterful telling of this tale of governmental cruelty and the shadow armies of ordinary citizens who both facilitate and resist is its own best testimony to the unpredictable possibilities of storytelling.
Painted with broad strokes with its elevated, mythic quality — and it can seem a little message-driven at times. But this is a function of its oracular style — the broad, slightly abstracted tone of a truth-teller — depicting the workings of control and domination throughout a culture and a nation ... Bird embarks on an epic adventure to hunt for Margaret. The writing tightens with suspense as new questions arise about who he’ll encounter and what he’ll learn about his missing mother ... Within Margaret’s section is an especially beautiful tribute to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova whose work was censored and who serves as a source of inspiration to those who never expected to resist ... An intriguing and multifaceted character, Margaret writes poetry, which inadvertently becomes a touchstone for the resistance movement. The notion of the accidental warrior is one of the many generous and compassionate aspects of Ng’s story — the idea that there is something brave in everyone — if only it can be reached. In this novel, both mother and son are called upon to look within themselves and connect with their deepest reserves of strength.
Ng's tone here is one of persistent alarm; the prose is as clear and straightforward ... The dystopian setting becomes richer with each detail — the imagery of the propaganda posters is especially good — and slowly, the peripheral characters develop more substance ... Ng offers abundant images of words being removed, covered, erased. Language and story, her new work suggests, cannot be taken for granted; stories must always be heard, always be told.
Bird’s quest powers Our Missing Hearts forward through the first and strongest of its three sections ... Once we leave Bird’s narration and move into Margaret’s more adult voice, however, Our Missing Hearts begins to falter. Margaret is amorphous, less a real character than a political cipher who exists to draw emphatic underlines below all Ng’s real-world parallels ... Whenever Margaret is talking, this book has a tendency to swing from interestingly polemic to disastrously didactic ... In contrast, Ng’s writing about parenthood is tender, lucid, and unsentimental ... In her love for Bird, Margaret resolves at last into a real person: in the specificity of it, the sensuality ... Our Missing Hearts is a weaker outing than its predecessor, clumsier and less grounded in character, too ham-fisted in the political points it’s determined to make. Still, it shines in Ng’s language, and in the dark fairy tale she conjures forth.
Our Missing Hearts is interested in families, their lies and secrets, and the experiences of Asian Americans—skillfully situating these in a broad sociopolitical context. One of Ng’s recurring themes is the agony of loss of both culture and home ... Ng can entice a range of readers into a complex story and make them want to stay.
... a dark landscape on which anti-Asian hate, book bannings, family separation, and other forms of oppression rage. 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 ... Ng’s brilliance lies in leaving the reader with an unshakable belief that against all odds, people will find the courage to resist, revolt, and defend. Like many before her, Margaret is a reluctant but spectacular revolutionary. How her journey unfolds, and how that affects both Ethan and Bird, is at the beating heart of this remarkable novel, one that is as much paean to art and family as it is chilling cautionary tale.
There is a haunting quiet in Celeste Ng’s new book Our Missing Hearts...that in some ways feels so parallel to our current lives that it is among the most thoughtful, yet disturbing of dystopian novels. Coupled with the humanity and sweetness of the unbreakable love between a mother and her child, it is a book you won’t be able to put down, nor stop thinking about long after you do ... Bird is a likable, believable character who seems both naïve at times and brave at others. The book moves from a meditation on our current political and social state to a tight suspenseful thriller ... Ng’s paragraphs are built with sentences so lovely and lyrical you likely will find yourself marking passages in every chapter to share with others.
Just replay the January 6 hearings, and you’ll know what I mean, and what Ng meticulously, eloquently, and devastatingly gets at in Our Missing Hearts ... Celeste Ng has written another wonder of family lost and found, and about the force of words and art that connect and set free.
Some books are great because there is a plot twist down the road and that road is a fun time ... Pittsburgh native Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts is so compelling the reader will immediately want to know how it ends and that road – though every word is worthy – will seem like the enemy ... Pushes the reader along into territory that is uncomfortable and necessary. Our Missing Hearts soaks up societal ills like a sponge and wrings humanity from each sentence, laying our collective monsters out on each page in blistering detail ... While racing to the end of the novel, the reader discovers the long-lasting bond of family, the unyielding love between mother and child and a culture consumed by fear trying to find the pieces of its missing heart.
Ng creates this new world order with restraint and ingenuity ... The first success of the book is Ng’s decision to land the reader into the dystopia, without giving context ... These short, intense scenes build to a compelling portrait of a father and son living in fear ... The child voice offers an intriguing perspective, relayed skilfully by Ng ... The great strength of Our Missing Hearts is Ng’s ability to plot and pace her story ... Not everything fares as successfully. Narrated in three parts, with Bird’s mother taking over for much of Parts II and III, the vividness of early sections dissolves amid pages and pages of back story that fill in the history of the Crisis and PACT. Although this history feels more grounded in the real world than the dystopian part of the novel, it is somehow less believable. Rather than experience the chaos first-hand, we are simply told about all the terrible and dramatic things that happened, one after the other ... It is easy for sentimentality to bleed into writing of this kind. There is a tendency towards the saccharine, particularly when Margaret recounts her idyllic former life as a wife and mother, and the loss she has felt in the intervening years. More clarity is needed too about her role as a poet activist, which seems largely a misunderstanding by the authorities, but one that Margaret never attempts to correct ... a fictionalised version of that horror, with resonance far beyond the page.
... remarkable ... as moving as it is gripping ... The book makes heavy political points, yet her writing feels gorgeously supple ... makes it clear that passing that knowledge on is critical too.
Ng traverses familiar territory of fraught familial dynamics and the multifaceted nature of identity. While the characters’ interpersonal relationships have moments of brilliance, they ultimately feel smothered under Ng’s world-building and lead to lingering questions long after the book has ended ... Bird, our inquisitive preteen protagonist, is thoughtful and understated like many of Ng’s child characters ... These early chapters introduce much more, namely the crushing weight of PACT, the aforementioned nationalistic legislation. PACT is mentioned on nearly every page of the first few chapters, delivered literally as didactic schoolwork, and lays the foundation for what will come. Its inclusion makes sense, but doing so at this pace leaves little room for Bird to flourish as a character. While much of the book is narrated in his perspective through a limited third person, said style keeps the boy at arms length from the reader. Ultimately, the balance of world-building to characterization, especially in the first half of the novel, leads to little interest in Bird himself apart from his relation to his enigmatic mother ... Ultimately the novel stands on Ng’s depiction of the world, which gathers its power from its close proximity to how we live today ... The project proves ambitious, absorbing, and thought-provoking, but often imbalanced, and could have supported an even greater page length in the number of topics it attempts to cover.
Is this a book about big themes? Yes, and openly so. It is also deeply poetic, beautifully and succinctly written, and thoroughly immersive. It arrives at a time when we are still measuring the wake of the pandemic lockdowns upon mental health and seeing our own prejudices writ large play out in public policy, in social media rants, in everyday violence ... To Ng’s great credit, Bird and his mother are not merely tokens used to make any number of political points. They are nuanced and relatable ... Ng’s book provokes a greater appreciation of the power of words and language, and the beauty of uniting through stories. She is naturally attuned to setting a scene, then weaving cadence, fluidity, and the beauty of language into a world we can exist within only briefly, but it makes a permanent heart-shaped imprint.
Her description of living in New York during the Crisis forms the most vivid and compelling section of the novel. It also drives home one of Ng’s central messages: that heroes generally arise out of circumstance rather than characte ... The ability of art to tell the truth, to cut through and connect with people where other forms of communication have failed, is the novel’s other key theme, and it’s a high-jeopardy one. In making the case for art’s capacity to change hearts and minds Ng risks straying into the sort of dubiously twee territory that Ian McEwan occupied in Saturday (2005) and certainly there are moments here when the claims made for the power of words (and, indeed, librarians) tilt us unconvincingly away from dystopia into something more like fairy tale. But the novel’s final act is sufficiently ambiguous to bear the thematic weight. If art does have power, Our Missing Hearts suggests, it is to tell the stories of those unable to speak for themselves. In taking this course Celeste Ng offers a spark of much-needed hope, both for her characters and for readers out in the real world, as 2022 draws to its uneasy close.
Depressingly, not much about the dystopian setting in Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts seems that far-fetched ... feels like a deliberate and almost defiant break with the previous novel ... opts for a swooning lyrical style that dispenses with quotation marks the better to illuminate its major themes – racial oppression, motherhood, the redemptive power of story and myth – but is populated by barely half a dozen characters. Bird’s quest resolves very quickly, and halfway through the book, the only real question that remains is how far Margaret and the opposition movement are willing to go to challenge the regime ... the author doesn’t dramatise the machinery of oppression or attempt to present the viewpoints of its sympathisers. As a result, the dystopia feels underpowered and generic, and opposing it doesn’t seem as dangerous as it ought to. The parallels between the author’s invented world and ours are clear enough – banned books, enforced patriotism, attacks on racial minorities – but it lacks strangeness and specificity. It’s conscientiously rooted in today’s crises, but doesn’t take us any further. There are no imaginative leaps comparable to Margaret Atwood’s handmaids, Orwell’s Newspeak or Room 101, or the rag-bag troupe of players performing Shakespeare in Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven. As dystopias go, the world of Our Missing Hearts ends up seeming considerably less bad than life in, say, Xinjiang or North Korea, never mind Gilead or Airstrip One ... Such is the moral complexity of the real world – and the kind of unexpected twist that this book lacks. Our Missing Hearts, like Margaret, insists on the redemptive power of fairytales. And within their unambiguous moral worlds, happily-ever-afters are achievable. But in real life, we know that simplistic narratives are just as likely to be the road into dystopia as the road out of it.
... a feat of meaty storytelling wrapped around a stark warning about the present day’s racial divisions, political conflicts and inequality ... manages to wrench adventure, heroism and bravery from a painful set-up ... Throughout, the writing is quick and poised ... Ng effortlessly combines a character-led family story with a detective tale, a tribute to books and storytelling and a confrontation with history. Her portrait of Noah’s mother, Margaret Miu, enables her to have some fun with standard arts festival panel questions ... While Pact and the crisis may be inventions, it would be wrong to call the novel prophetic or futuristic. All the elements of the novel’s setting are already here, readable in the headlines every morning ... The America of Our Missing Hearts is already with us. From these dark roots, Celeste Ng crafts a story that is exceptionally powerful and scaldingly relevant.
The novel feels algorithmically set to appeal to a paradox particularly prevalent among Millennials and Generation Z: a fixation on the individual experience equalled by an appetite for tribal inclusion. And the dystopian narrative is the perfect vehicle for that contradiction, combining as it often does the struggle of the underdog with a search for kinsfolk ... Ng has crafted a neatly structured story — split into three parts, giving the viewpoints of Bird and his mother, followed by the consequences of their reunion — and conjured up a feasible vision of a near-future America. The novel, however, is let down by a syrupy treatment of romantic and parental relationships. The mother-son equation is touching but hyperbolic, and Bird and Sadie too often sound and think like adults, their reasoning frequently structured like an identity politics seminar ... More impressive is Ng’s treatment of the gradual disintegration of objective lawmaking, the incremental rise of racism and the tendency for people to turn the other way in the face of injustice ... Perhaps the cleverest touch, however, is Ng’s depiction of librarians as honourable knights and libraries as silos of dissent (the American library service is presently combating a sharp rise in book bans). Ultimately, Ng’s skill at plotting cuts through the occasional slip into schmaltz to produce an engaging cautionary tale. No doubt it will be on a streaming service sometime soon.
... heartbreaking ... a departure from Ng’s previous novels, but her talent is as apparent as ever. The novel shines when narrated by its innocent, precocious protagonist ... A poignant and timely commentary on anti-Asian hate, child separation and book bans, but also a celebration of the power of words and stories and the love between mothers and their children, Our Missing Hearts is a gut-punch of a novel that should serve as a cautionary tale.
Celeste Ng is undoubtedly at the top of her game. The American society she depicts in Our Missing Hearts is overcome by fear, serving as a poignant critique of our own increasingly fraught and oppressive political landscape ... Ng’s focus on the unbreakable bond between mother and son elevates the story to more than a cautionary dystopian tale ... Ng’s prose highlights the fateful and sometimes absurd connections between our world and the realm of ideas, reminding readers that what is in our heads will always reveal itself in our bodies. The result is a novel that will undoubtedly impact how we connect and live in this terrifying, beautiful world.
To describe Celeste Ng’s latest novel as dystopian is to risk the loss of potential readers and understate both the timeliness and timelessness of this fantastic book ... a stunning work. Ng’s characters wrestle with injustice in diverse and compelling ways, using language and images, poetry and technology, as they rely on a courageous underground network for support. Bird is the perfect guide. He is at the age where he is just beginning to understand the world and people around him, question authority and demand agency. He is every bit the son of a linguist turned librarian and a poet turned rebel. Ng has crafted a set of memorable characters who are brave and flawed, hopeful yet realistic ... This is a gorgeous and provocative novel that asks readers to look critically at American society and reject all modes of tyranny in favor of company, acceptance and love.
So much of this utterly stupendous tale is hauntingly, horrifically, historically, currently all too real, from removing and caging children to anti-Asian hate crimes, violent protests, police brutality, and despotic (so-called) leadership. Yet Ng creates an exquisite story of unbreakable family bonds, lifesaving storytelling (and seemingly omniscient librarians!), brilliantly subversive art, and accidentally transformative activism. As lyrical as it is chilling, as astonishing as it is empathic, Our Missing Hearts arguably achieves literary perfection.
Known for focusing on families, race, and relationships, Ng raises the bar another notch in a story intensified by reference to such police violence, political protest, book banning, and discrimination against people of color ... Beautiful yet chilling ... As with her previous novels, her storytelling will not disappoint.
Eerie, prophetic ... Has an occasional glimmer of Margaret Atwood or Fahrenheit 451 but primarily showcases Ng's own ingenuity and range. Brilliantly envisioned and filled with Ng's signature tender, intimate character work and complex family dynamics, this coming-of-age story asks what it means to be a good parent or a good citizen when every child is at risk, as well as what power art has to challenge injustice.
Remarkable ... Ng crafts an affecting family drama out of the chilling and charged atmosphere, and shines especially when offering testimony to the power of art and storytelling ... Ng’s latest crackles and sizzles all the way to the end.
Sensitive, nuanced, and vividly drawn ... Taut and terrifying, Ng’s cautionary tale transports us into an American tomorrow that is all too easy to imagine—and persuasively posits that the antidotes to fear and suspicion are empathy and love ... Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.
