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West Branch Fiction Book Discussion

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

We read a variety of contemporary and classic fiction and meet the last Thursday of every month for discussion in person and virtually via Zoom. January's selection: Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng.

We read a variety of diverse contemporary and classic fiction and meet once a month for a thought-provoking conversation. Register for in-person or virtual. Copies of the book are available for check out at the West Branch reference desk. Contact discussion facilitator Becky Clark at rclark@aurorapubliclibrary.org for more information.

Book description:

A novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His 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.

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