Our Missing Hearts

I got really excited when I read the premise: a network of radical librarians helping to resist a regime that is based on anti-Asian hate, but that's really only a small part of the story. It's really primarily about the relationships between a son and his mother (and also somewhat about authorship and the life of a work of art). The fact that it's a realistic dystopia says a lot of the current state of the US. In general I liked it a lot, but it had a slow build to a relatively short and abrupt ending. I feel like the last third of the book could have been extended. Still, it's beautifully written, and I highly recommend it.

Near-future realist dystopia pushes family decisions up against absolutes... and these characters fail to live up to the awkward narrative tangle Ng puts them in. Changes on many levels could have made this an important book, but it ends up not mattering.