There was a lot I liked about Celeste Ng’s newest book, Our Missing Hearts, and a few things I didn’t. Right off the bat I will say the description on the book jacket almost made me not check the book out from the library. It just didn’t sound very interesting to me, but because I have really enjoyed her other two novels (Everything I Never Told You more than Little Fires Everywhere, which may be an unpopular opinion) I decided to give it a go, and I am glad I did.

I found the story almost immediately more interesting that the description had led me to believe it would be. Set in a dystopian United States where Asian-Americans are all treated equally terribly because they “look” Chinese (I thought this was poignant because people from many different areas of the world get mislabeled by white American’s who can’t, or can’t be bothered, to notice the differences in people from different countries). PACT divides non-Asian citizens from their neighbors, and one of the most abhorrent things about this new America is that children are sometimes taken from their parents and re-homed (and if that sounds preposterous to you, I suggest you do some reading on America’s history of removing children from their parents homes to reeducate them in American “values”).

The three main characters are a nuclear family that has been broken by the changes in America; Ethan, the white dad, Margaret the Chinese-American mom, and their 12 year-old son Noah (formerly affectionately known as Bird). Ethan and his father are living without Margaret because a poem she had written when she was younger inadvertently became the slogan of the people fighting against PACT, and they knew their son would be taken because of this, so she left before that could happen.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I did find the story interesting, and not completely out of the realm of real possibility in the political climate we live in these days. Ng is an excellent writer. I do wish she had developed the characters a bit more deeply, specifically Ethan, and to a lesser extent Bird, because while I felt for them as the story progressed, neither felt as known as Margaret.

Rating: ★★★★☆

And as always, here are my alternate book covers. I prefer the one on the left; would love feedback on which one you think is better.