Emily May's Reviews > Our Missing Hearts

There are a number of reasons Our Missing Hearts didn't work for me, but I can sum up my general feeling for the book as being similar to how I felt about The Testaments and Klara and the Sun (ironic, perhaps, given that I praised Ng in my review of that book):

Our Missing Hearts is a YA dystopia that I guess passes for literary fiction because of the super clever absence of speech marks.

Let me say that I had started to consider myself a fan of Celeste Ng and will likely seek out her future books. Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You were relatively slow, quiet character studies, yet they were excellent examples of slow, quiet character studies. The characters felt alive, felt real. Their suburban worries and struggles, hopes and dreams, pulled me in. It is quite wonderful to be so mesmerized by simplicity.

Our Missing Hearts, unfortunately, had all of the slow pacing and none of the depth of characterization. Bird experiences the loss of a parent and the crumbling of justice and society all around him, but he views it detached, as if from a distance, never quite seeming to experience or react to it himself and making it difficult for me to do so as the reader.

Bird's mother, Margaret, also feels one-dimensional. She makes some difficult decisions-- such as abandoning her son --yet I never once felt let inside the emotional turmoil that surely should have caused.

Instead, much of this novel is given over to describing the details and injustices of PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act). According to the government, the act sets out to protect American values from foreign influence (China is considered especially problematic), but what it really serves as is an excuse for racism and violence against minorities. People are being arrested for even questioning the act; children are being taken away from parents who are deemed bad influences.

I was having a hard time for the first half of the book when we were on Bird's perspective, but I grew even more weary during Margaret's perspective when we were taken on a flashback through how she met Bird's dad and how PACT came to be.

Perhaps I am just burned out on dystopias at this point. A dystopia has to have something unique or have really memorable characters to hold my interest and stand out in this over-saturated genre. Our Missing Hearts, with its controlling government, banning books, secret resistance and flat characters, was not that.