In other ways, Our Missing Hearts feels like a deliberate and almost defiant break with the previous novel. Set in the planned community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, during the 1990s, Little Fires Everywhere took the form of a whodunnit, the solving of which anatomises the moral failings of the privileged Richardson family and their friends, and explores themes of motherhood, class, art and identity. That too is a book about a failed utopian experiment, though on a more modest and naturalistic scale. Our Missing Hearts follows the blockbuster success of Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, an international bestseller which was adapted for television. It’s not giving too much away, I hope, to reveal that Bird chooses the second option and goes on a journey that reveals the moral bankruptcy of the regime and introduces him to the handful of people resisting it. Will he stick with his compromising father, or follow the clues in the message in the hope of finding his way back to his politically undesirable mother? Just enough backstory is sketched in for us to grasp the nature of Bird’s world and the terrible dilemma in which he finds himself.
Our Missing Hearts feels like a deliberate and almost defiant break with Little Fires EverywhereĪs the novel opens, Bird has just received an unexpected message from his mother. And his absent mother, Margaret, who abandoned the family when he was eight, is widely regarded as a traitor to the new regime.
Half Asian on his mother’s side, and therefore already suspect, he’s a quirky, sensitive child who insists on being called Bird, a nickname of his own invention. Demoted from his academic post to working as a librarian, he advocates keeping quiet and carrying on. Ethan is an affable, bookish man, but like almost everyone else, he’s unwilling to challenge the forces of reaction. Amid this creeping oppression, in Cambridge, Massachusetts – once a bastion of liberal tolerance and academic excellence – 12-year-old Noah is growing up under the care of his dad, Ethan.
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