Oct 2025, "Our Missing Hearts" by Celeste Ng

This month we will read and discuss "Our Missing Hearts" by Celeste Ng.

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 learn the truth about what happened to his mother and what the future holds for them both.

Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s about the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children and the power of art to create change.

DETAILS ABOUT OUR MEETING: We are starting at 6:00 PM for a general greetings and a potluck supper. The book discussion will begin at about 6:45 PM. At the conclusion of the discussion, we will elect the next CLASSIC-Fiction book to discuss at the December 2025 meetup. The candidate books will be:

1. "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett
2. "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle
3. "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov

Hope to see you there.