Great book. Would be a good book club read. ( )

This book was a disturbing look at racism against Asian people and showed a dystopian society where free speech, thoughts or actions were eliminated. The scary part is that in this day and age it seems this isn't completely improbable. The main character a young boy named Bird, looks for his estranged mother who is Asian and has left to protect him. Interesting concept but I wasn't completely engaged the entire time. Very different from the author's other books. ( )

A futuristic novel when American society has been purged of Asian influence as un-American. The primary character is a mixed race boy (Bird) whose mom is Asian and dad is Caucasian. Mom is on the run because her poetry is considered subversive and a threat to the state. Bird is being raised by his dad who is considered OK. Over time Bird researches mom's poetry and eventually he is able to reconnect with mom. The novel hearkens to "The Handmaid's Tale" and a repressive state. ( )

The Crisis is over, and the government is now run under a group of new laws called PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions). While the novel never explains exactly what the Crisis was, it resulted in inflation, joblessness, violence and despair, all of which was generally blamed on China. Not surprisingly, there was a sharp increase in attacks on Asian Americans, and the government did absolutely nothing about it. In fact, PACT encouraged citizens to report their friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for any "unAmerican" or "immoral" acts or words (or even thoughts); not to do so was "unpatriotic." (Sound familiar?) Children were even taught in the classroom that this was their civic duty. As a result, many lives were devastated, including that of Bird Gardner, the 12-year old boy at the heart of the story.

Bird's father was a professor of linguistics before the Crisis, and was his mother was a Chinese-American poet who penned only one modestly successful book. Although she was not in any way responsible for it, the underground protest movement took a phrase from one of her poems, "All our missing hearts," and made it their slogan. The "missing hearts" were children who had been removed from their supposedly "dangerous" parents. When the government launched an investigation, all of her books (and indeed MANY books considered unpatriotic or immoral) were removed from libraries and either burned or recycled into toilet paper. Bird's father was demoted to working in the college's almost bare library. Fearing that the government would take Bird, his mother went on the run and his father, claiming that their marriage had been broken for years, trashed all of her belongings to prove his patriotism and compliance with PACT. Still, he lost their house, and when the story opens, he and Bird are living in a dorm on campus.

One day Bird receives a card in the mail that is covered with doodles of cats. It triggers a memory of a story his mother used to tell him about a boy and a cat, and he believes that there is a message hidden in the card. Bird, like many of the children taken from their parents (including his friend Sadie), becomes determined to find his mother.

The rest of the novel goes back and forth in time, telling us the background of Bird's parents, their life together before the Crisis, his mother's life in hiding, and the struggles of his friend Sadie, as well as Bird's quest to find his mother. The characters are all intriguing and the world they live in post-Crisis is (unfortunately) familiar. While I don't usually read dystopian novels, I am glad I picked up this one. ( )

What makes this book so unsettling is that it is not completely out of the realm of possibility for this situation to happen, given the state of world affairs.

This book reminds me of the debt we owe to those who risk everything to stand up to regimes who use the removal of children to exert political control. It is a reminder too of the importance of knowing the stories of the lives of the real children that this has happened to – and continues to happen to. ( )