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BOOK review
Started on: 10 October 2022
Finished on: 3 November 2022
Title: Our Missing Hearts
Author: Celeste Ng
Publisher: Penguin Press
Pages: 335 pages / 352 pages (e-book)
Year of Publication: 2022
Price: Rp 265,000 (
Periplus)
Rating: 4/5
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"So now, out of the blue: a letter from his mother. It looks like her handwriting—and no one else would call him that. Bird."
Twelve-year-old Noah 'Bird' Gardner lives a quiet life with his father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird has always been told not to ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. In the past decade, their lives have been governed by PACT, laws written to preserve "American culture" after years of economic instability and violence that they call the Crisis. The authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books that are deemed as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird's mother, Margaret, a Chinese-American poet who left the family when he was nine years old. Bird has no idea what happened to his mother and why she left, but when he receives a mysterious letter containing a cryptic drawing, he is suddenly pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him to many places where he meets a lot of people and to a city where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of a much-needed change.
"He doesn't remember much about his mother, but he remembers this: she always had a plan. She would not have taken the trouble to find their new address, and the risk of writing him, for no reason."
