Bird knows the letter is from his mother. One day, Bird receives a letter - a sheet of paper, really - filled with ballpoint drawings of cats. Just keep on walking, his father says if passersby stare, their gazes like centipedes on Bird's face. They also call her a traitor, someone who violated something called the PACT law - Preserving American Culture and Traditions.īird learns early from his white father that it's better not to respond to provocation. Margaret was a PAO, a person of Asian origin, a Kung Pao, as some of Bird's classmates taunt. Bird's mother, Margaret, a poet, vanished without explanation some three years earlier. The opening section of 'Our Missing Hearts' has the feel of a YA crossover novel, starting with our main character, a 12-year-old boy named Bird, who lives with his father, a former college professor, now mysteriously demoted to shelving books in the campus library. It's the novel's close congruity to our current off-kilter reality, so easily tipped here into 'The Twilight Zone,' that makes 'Our Missing Hearts' even more unsettling than are many other more extreme dystopian visions.

In her author's note, Ng says that the world she's summoned up in 'Our Missing Hearts' isn't exactly our world, but it isn't not ours, either. Fear muffles freedom of expression and obliterates any books or people suspected of dissent. John Mandel's 'Station Eleven' or Ling Ma's 'Severance,' or the subzero misogyny of Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale.' Celeste Ng's latest novel, 'Our Missing Hearts,' also leans towards ice as it imagines the ends of things - in this case, the end of American democracy being precipitated by the chill of mass indifference. Frost's general categories still hold up in contemporary dystopian fiction, whether it's the fever of a pandemic, as in Emily St.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: That classic no-win option comes courtesy of Robert Frost's 1920 poem 'Fire And Ice,' in which he imagines the end of the world arriving via all-consuming desire for conquest, perhaps, or icy hatred.

Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, says Ng's latest novel, called 'Our Missing Hearts,' is set in a world that simultaneously reflects and amplifies our current anxious realities. That novel was made into a Hulu series starring Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon. Celeste Ng is best known for her 2017 bestselling novel 'Little Fires Everywhere,' which was set in the upscale suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio.

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