Audiobook review of Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

In Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts (10 hours), 12-year-old Bird Gardner lives in a dystopian near-future during which the United States exists beneath the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT), a mandate that claims to uphold patriotism by banning books, relocating kids and condemning something “un-American,” particularly relating to Asian tradition. But when Bird receives a letter from his lacking mom, a Chinese American poet who protested PACT, he’s thrown into an journey to find his heritage, his previous and his household. 

Actor Lucy Liu’s narration achieves a steadiness between the novel’s bigger political story and the intimate interior worlds of Ng’s characters. Liu’s voice is calm and regular but additionally follows the e-book’s highs and lows, matching Ng’s lyrical prose to carry out the story’s emotion, thriller and heartbreak.

In this novel of household bonds examined by sociopolitical horrors, Ng’s writing and Liu’s narration collaborate to display how resistance needn’t all the time be loud; it will also be highly effective in small, quiet, private methods.