So Bird is 12, and he is living in a version of America that's like ours but maybe with the volume turned up a little bit - is the best way I can explain it. What is going on in his life when we meet him? The novel is called "Our Missing Hearts," and author Celeste Ng joins us now to talk about it. Their parents have no idea where they are. Authorities remove children from their homes, assign them to new families. In this dystopia, violating PACT, even questioning the law, puts families at risk. RASCOE: His mother, a poet and an activist. And because of this, he knows it is from his mother. No return address, only a New York, New York postmark six days old. But eventually, it had been deemed harmless and sent on its way. It had caused confusion at the post office, the clerk unfolding the paper inside, steadying it, passing it up to his supervisor, then the boss. “Can we actually make a difference? How can we teach our children to make the world better when we ourselves have failed to do so? To me, Our Missing Hearts is about keeping a sense of shared humanity alive in dark, cynical, and isolating times, and I hope it resonates with readers.Celeste Ng's new novel opens with a preteen boy and a sense of foreboding, a la The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, or PACT, looms over everything.ĬELESTE NG: (Reading) The letter arrives on a Friday, slit and resealed with a sticker, of course, as all their letters are. “I started off simply writing a book about a mother and a son, but soon found myself wrestling with questions raised by the larger reckonings taking place-or being avoided-in the past few years,” wrote Ng in a statement. As Penguin Press puts it, “ journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.” Bird’s tried not to wonder too much about what happened to his mother-but when he receives a cryptic letter, he is sucked into a quest to find her.
Among the books removed is the work of Bird’s mother, a Chinese American poet who left when he was nine. In order to preserve “American culture,” authorities are now legally allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries are forced to remove “unpatriotic” books. Our Missing Hearts follows twelve-year-old Bird Gardner, who lives quietly with his ex-linguist father who currently shelves books in Harvard’s library. Penguin Press announced today that it will publish Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere author Celeste Ng’s new novel, Our Missing Hearts, on October 4th, 2022.
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