Ng’s writing prowess is something to behold, growing with each novel she puts out. For those of you readers out there who haven’t had the privilege of reading a Celeste Ng novel, I’d definitely recommend you correct this. 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. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her.

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.īird 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. 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. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. 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.

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