Our Missing Hearts
A near-future America persecuting those with sympathies toward China. Ng's third novel is her most ambitious: an urgent story about Asian-American identity, surveillance, and what parents do to protect their children.
Part Two drops Bird’s search to fill in Margaret’s backstory, and multiple readers use the same phrase for what happens next, “telling and no showing”, as the world-building turns expository and the momentum from Part One stalls out. Ng drops quotation marks around all dialogue, a choice more than one reviewer calls “the super clever absence of speech marks” rather than an earned technique. Bird himself reads flat to some, watching his own life from a distance, and the surrounding authoritarian state gets asserted more than dramatized, with the back-half stakes striking one reader as “basically the hunger games”. After the slow buildup, the ending lands for several as “anticlimactic garbage”, the whole book, one writes, “flat as a pamphlet” by the close.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
