Our Missing Hearts by Celeste NgMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
"Nonsense, mystery, and magic." The mainstays of childhood. Or so they should be. In Celeste Ng's dystopic not-so-distant-future novel, stories and poems figure heavily in the fight against tyranny. The novel is beautiful and distressing all at once. Rather than solely focused on the political, Ng crafts her tale around 12 year old Bird (aka Noah), whose mother has seemingly abandoned him in the wake of the Crisis, to live in a campus dorm with his father who works at the university library as a clerk, although he had recently been a professor. One is swiftly aware that life under PACT (Preserving American Cultures and Traditions) has come with many terrors and secrets, not least of which is children who have gone missing. Strange artistic forms of protest begin to appear, resistance in the form of yarn and hearts.
"They [the police] are equipped for violence, but not for this" the narrator tells us as the police stand around a tree that has been wrapped in red yarn.
The most impactful dystopias are those that are not a far reach from our realities--ones where we can say "It CAN happen here." While there are moments where the backstory of the poem (All Our Missing Hears), in particular, got a bit heavy-handed (hits you over the head with the message and drags on a bit), the book is full of grace and small acts of heroism that blossom into resistance. But it is also about people and relationships. For once, I loved the ending, as it was real in feeling and drove home the point of the book better than some of the more obvious attempts at a cautionary tale. And yes, librarians might save the world.
Lucy Liu's reading was near perfect -- without caricature, but just subtle enough to clearly define the individual characters.
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