OUR MISSING HEARTS by Celeste Ng

This book's political angle hits uncomfortably close to home.  The Crisis, a period of economic collapse, yielded way to a dystopian, fascist, xenophobic society with a Stepford tinge to it.  I would say that this book is prescient with its glimpse of what could be coming, but some aspects of it are already here, such as the removal of banned books from school libraries.  The right-wing extremist government described here has discovered that the most effective way to scare people into doing its bidding is to threaten to take away their children.  Sound familiar?  Parents who don’t parrot the government line will have their children placed in foster homes, and countless children have been relocated, thanks to a government-sanctioned vigilante system.  Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner, nicknamed Bird, would be in danger of being removed if his mother hadn’t fled and gone into hiding after a line from one of her poems became the rallying cry for subversives.  This book works well when it is firing a warning shot about what could be ahead for this country, but other aspects of the plot seem a little too convenient.  For example, Bird’s mother acquires the assistance of an old friend who happens to be extremely wealthy with access to some sophisticated technology, and the reunion of Bird with an old school friend in a completely different city struck me as an unlikely coincidence.  The small cast of characters gives the book an intimacy that contrasts with the global issues this book raises, and the plot moves along nicely, except for a section in which Bird’s mother goes into way too much descriptive detail of the Crisis.  I could have skipped that section and not missed out on anything.