Bookn' with Friends: "Our Missing Hearts" by Celeste Ng

Name: Bookn' with Friends: "Our Missing Hearts" by Celeste Ng
Start: 2025-08-25T18:30:00-05:00
Location: 605 College St, Winfield, KS, United States, Kansas 67156

Schedule

Mon, 25 Aug, 2025 at 06:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

605 College St, Winfield, KS, United States, Kansas 67156 | Winfield, KS

WPL's adult book club, Bookn' with Friends, will meet for a discussion of Celeste Ng's 2022 novel "Our Missing Hearts" on Monday, August 25 at 6:30pm. A story about the power art, the legacies we pass on, and the struggle to survive a broken world while keeping our hearts intact, "Our Missing Hearts" was selected to meet the 2025 Challenge of "a book from a celebrity book list." It was the October 2022 selection for Reese's Book Club and has a 3.8 rating on Goodreads.
From the publisher:
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 not to 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 a much-needed change.