In truth, I don't know where you go after a runaway success like Little Fires Everywhere. Ng's first two novels are such taut character studies that my expectations were high going into Our Missing Hearts, but ultimately, this isn't a successor to Ng's earlier work so much as it is a pivot. Something that has Ng's familiar, empathic glow in places, but is uniquely itself. However, Our Missing Hearts reads as a novel unsure of itself. Dystopian in places, a love letter to libraries in others, a road trip to (re)discover motherhood in others—but at the center, Bird and Margaret never jumped off the page in the way you want them. They felt half-developed, so desperately wanting to belong to something larger than themselves, but constantly stepping in their own way. There's so little character development that I couldn't tell you a substantial thing about Bird, despite spending the majority of the book with him. Ng's world building in the form of PACT legislation felt like she was right on the pulse of something incendiary, but it never quite got there. I see the potential of this story; I see what Ng was trying to reach. Memory, motherhood, national identity. Nobody can ever say Ng doesn't lean into her fiction; she writes with precision and empathy, but there was just too much missing from the center. As it stands, Our Missing Hearts reads like an early manuscript before the author has really figured out the character connections and what they're really trying to say. I hope her next novel is able to find its footing a little better.