Book guide
Our Missing Hearts
A twelve-year-old boy follows a cryptic clue into a book-banning dystopian America to uncover the truth about his missing mother.
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About Our Missing Hearts
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn't know what happened to her-only that her books have been banned-and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him. Then one day, Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon 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 heroic librarians, and finally to New York City, where he will finally learn the truth about what happened to his mother, and what the future holds for them both.
Reading signals
- Spice
- None
- Darkness
- Dark
- Pacing
- Balanced
Content warnings
- parental separation
- child separation
- book banning
- censorship
- racism
- anti-Asian racism
- xenophobia
- state violence
- animal death
- hate crimes
- classism
- death of a parent
- child death
- physical assault
- animal cruelty
