I have read Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and thought it was a good, interesting novel, but I was not blown away by it. So, when Our Missing Hearts was released recently, I did not initially feel the need to read it. But then Indigo named it the best book of the year, and I knew that I must read it. I am not completely sold on it being the best book of the year, but Our Missing Hearts is a great, timely novel that tells a compelling story that I devoured in one day.

Our Missing Hearts is set in the near future when an economic crisis has led to the rise of a totalitarian, supremacist US government that blames China and other Asian countries for the economic instability and violence that rocked the country for years. The country is governed by The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (“PACT”), a MAGA-inspired doctrine that “promises to protect American values”. The government has the power to remove children of dissidents who do not comply with PACT and foster them with new families, akin to the forced relocation of Indigenous children in residential schools. Anything viewed as unpatriotic is censored, which has led to book burnings, and children are taught a sanitized version of US history, similar to what Republicans are doing now by banning critical race theory from school curriculums. The treatment of Asian Americans in this near future hearkens back to the suspicion of Japanese American during WWII and their internment, and the more recent violence against Asian Americans who are being blamed for the “China virus”, as the former Cheeto in Chief so eloquently put it. There is one incredibly disturbing scene in the novel where an Asian American woman is brutally beaten, possibly to death, by a white man, a scene that is literally ripped from news headlines from earlier this year.

The novel is told mainly from the perspective of twelve-year-old Noah “Bird” Gardner, whose Chinese American mother left him and his father three years earlier for their safety after she unwittingly gets caught up in the anti-PACT resistance. Bird lives a lonely life. He is bullied at school because of his Asian features; his only friend, a Black girl who was taken away from her dissident parents, has run away so that she can find them. His father loves him and takes care of him, but he refuses to talk about Bird’s mother, or about much at all.

One day, Bird receives a letter in the mail which contains a piece of paper covered in drawings of cats. Bird immediately recognizes that this letter was sent by his mother, and receiving it sends him on a quest to find her. He travels from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts to New York and along the way meets people who are quietly working against the government, a reminder that no matter how brutal the government, no matter how most people seem to turn a blind eye to injustice, there will always be people out there who are capable of empathy and who resist and fight for a better future for everyone.

Our Missing Hearts tells a bleak story, but Ng tells it so beautifully and imbues so much hope into the novel, that I felt hopeful while reading it, despite the uncertainty of its ending and the uncertainty of the times that we currently live in. It may not be my favourite book of the year (so far that honour goes to Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility) but it definitely makes the short list. I am so glad that I decided to read it, and I think that you should read it too.