Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

On Tuesday 21st, 'Our Missing Hearts' by Celeste Ng divided the reading group. Set in the US, it depicts a not-too-distant future when years of crisis have allowed an authoritarian government to pass draconian laws removing freedoms, banning books, stoking fears about the rise of China and removing children from parents deemed 'un-American'.

We found the book quite frightening in the light of current events - and all too plausible. Government rhetoric in the US is increasingly anti-Chinese; in Europe asylum seekers/migrants are being scapegoated, blamed for housing shortages and more. And removing children is a policy that has been practised in the past in Ireland, Australia, Canada and the UK, and now at the US/Mexican border.
Some of us found the book difficult to get into, while others were engrossed by the story and compelled to read on. Some found the three central characters well drawn and sympathetic; others didn’t care about them.

We all enjoyed the father who read dictionaries in the evening and loved to deconstruct words; the librarians who became the custodians of knowledge and a conduit of illicit information about stolen children; and the redemptive power of stories and myth. However, we felt that Margaret Atwood’s 'The Handmaid’s Tale' was a far better written and more powerfully imagined dystopian America.

Some of us had been very irritated by the lack of quotation marks, the over-abundance of similes and metaphors, and the choice of typography.

Unequivocal thumbs up were just in the minority; several of us had not exactly enjoyed the book but we were mostly glad to have read it!
And it led to an interesting conversation about surveillance and modern technology, which is likely to be continued on 18 June when we will be discussing George Orwell’s 1984. Do join us at 3 p.m. if you fancy discussing this powerful and prescient novel which was published 75 years ago and was the origin of the terms 'Big Brother' and 'Room 101'.