Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s economic malaise. We have heard this tale of government scapegoating before, which adds to its power rather than detracting from it. That his mother, Margaret Miu, had no choice would make no difference to most children, it seems to me abandoned is abandoned. In that sense, the book is a classic tale of the hero’s journey, said hero young enough to make the trip from innocence to experience with surprisingly little bitterness directed toward the parent who has abandoned him. When Bird is given a clue to his mother’s whereabouts he goes in search of her, and much of Ng’s firmly written and well-executed novel deals with his adventures along the way.

Under PACT, the children of parents considered culturally or politically subversive are “re-placed” in foster families. Those books wiped someone’s rear end a long time ago.” (Bird doesn’t tell her he’s picturing book bonfires, but she intuits it.) “Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. “We pulp them,” a helpful librarian tells Bird. In Ng’s version of the American Nightmare, there’s no need to burn books. Now he works in a library, shelving books. (We’re given more details about this Crisis than we actually need.)īefore the Crisis, Bird’s father was a linguist. His mother is a fugitive, on the run because she wrote a supposedly subversive poem titled “All Our Missing Hearts.” America is living under PACT - the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act - which became law during a confused and economically disastrous period known as the Crisis. Noah Gardner, known as Bird, is a 12-year-old Chinese American living with his father in Cambridge, Mass. In “Our Missing Hearts,” Celeste Ng’s dystopian America is milder, which makes it more believable - and hence, more upsetting. In “1984”’s infamous Room 101, Winston Smith is finally broken when a cage filled with rats is dumped over his head. The firefighters in “Fahrenheit 451” incinerate books instead of saving them. “The Handmaid’s Tale” deals with state-sanctioned rape. In “The Time Machine,” the Morlocks feed and clothe the Eloi, then eat them. The definition of “dystopia ” in the Oxford English Dictionary is bald and to the point: “An imaginary place in which everything is as bad as possible.”

The missing hearts