Book Flight: a group that samples across the genres. Each month we will try something new and meet together to dive into the book together!

Join us as we discuss Celeste Ng's distopian literary fiction novel, Our Missing Hearts. 

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 to not 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 much-needed change.

Our Missing Hearts is a novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

Book Flight meets IN PERSON in the library's Community Room  AND on Zoom at 5:00PM. Please register to be in contact with staff, or call 831-646-3933 for more information. A Zoom link will be provided for participants wishing to attend online.