THE PECKERWOOD BOOK CLUB: Gimmie Back My Book! Plus A Terrifying "What If?" From Celeste Ng!

Welcome back, fellow readers, to The Peckerwood Book Club, where we chit-chat about what you've been reading, what you recommend and what you're looking forward to. In the meantime...

...remember lending your books to friends and family members? I say "remember," because if you're like me, you've been burned far too many times. Plus, the few times you bothered to ask for your book back, you invariably got responses like, "Really? Did you lend that to me? Gosh, I don't remember" or "I'm sure I'll find it somewhere" or "I think I lent that to someone else." Look, I'm not a scold (You: "Coulda fooled me!"), and by that I mean, if it's a paperback, I truly don't care if you keep it, lose it or feed it to your dog, but if it was something I cared enough to buy in hardback, then yes, actually, I want it back.

One time a friend gave me back a book with various sentences marked in yellow highlighter. "Oh, those were for the parts I wanted to remember to write down later," they told me. Who does this? Who told them it was ok? On the other hand, one friend, having had my book for only a few weeks, gave it back to me unprompted - and it was a brand new copy. "Fuck if I know what I did with yours," she said, having read the book and enjoyed it. "I think I lost it on the subway," she added, which is where she did most of her reading. So she bought me a spanking new copy, which was awfully Connecticut of her and I never hesitated to lend books to her again. 

Do you let anyone borrow your books? Do you expect to get them back? And when you do get them back, is anything mysteriously underlined (in pen)? My go-to excuse these days if I don't trust that someone is, "Sorry, can't. I actually borrowed this from my dad/sister/brother. But I'm sure you can get it at the library." I follow this with a thin smile and a pointed hair flip as needed. 

And now for something truly immersive - and sometimes harrowing (and which I have in hardback and you can't borrow it, so don't even ask): 

In this eerily effective “What if?” scenario, twelve-year-old Noah, aka Bird - a biracial youth born of a Chinese-American mother and a Caucasian father - desperately searches for his mother in a dangerous, alternative United States where children are routinely separated from their “unpatriotic” Asian parents, or those suspected of supporting China. Bird's mother, Margaret, a poet deemed to be anti-American, long ago abandoned her family and went underground.

Like "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Fahrenheit 451," "Our Missing Hearts" has been scrupulously conceived to be at once fantastical, yet frighteningly plausible, and utilizes ripped-from-the-headlines tragedies - both past and present, such as the separation of migrant children from their parents, the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII – to bolster its reality. The characters are strikingly drawn, including Bird, who barely remembers Margaret, yet is compelled to find her once she sends him a secret coded message. Margaret, presented in both flashbacks and the present, is a believably distraught, then fiercely emboldened, writer who's labeled a traitor by the government when her one of her poems is used as a rallying cry by protestors. 

Also well drawn are the large network of “underground railroad”-type librarians working in secret to track missing children for their parents, adding immeasurably to the scenario’s hushed suspense, one where even the possession of a lone banned book, such as Margaret’s poetry, can lead to catastrophe or worse. The celebrated author, whose novels usually explore family relationships and race with sometimes bone-chilling suspense, has never once disappointed me. 

Meanwhile, your happy-go-lucky Bibliophile Bendy Boy™ wants more-more-more. He's insatiable, actually, so give him all you've got and then some (by way of your book recommendations) (of course). Oh, and if you'd like to lend him out to friends, you better hope they return him!