“You’re going to make it, Chen. Time will be your friend. Everything is fucking temporary. The good and the bad, none of it is forever. And if nothing else, just wait.”
In May 1998, a baby girl is snatched at Philadelphia airport. Her mother, Mimi, is distraught and is flown home alone to Vietnam under sedation after hours of being interrogated and denied help in the search for her missing child. The years pass, but Mimi never forgets that day. She never moves on, and she never stops searching.
Seventeen years later, two best friends have just graduated from high school in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, and are looking for one last summer adventure before their futures begin. Sabrina Chen is working two jobs, saving up for her trip to China to meet her mother’s family. Meanwhile, Kit Herzog is headed for Tokyo, looking to connect with her biological mother’s roots and find out more than her wealthy adoptive parents will tell her.
“But when you meet that person you’ll feel like you want to fly straight out of whatever self-limiting cage you’ve built around yourself. And here’s the real shocker. That person, might even be you…you just haven’t met this version of yourself yet.”
My Other Heart is a profoundly candid novel about the intricate bonds that make us who we are. There are so many intersectional layers of race, class, and cultural divides, as well as grief, love, family, and identity, that intertwine to form tangible moments of truth and connection. It’s more vital than ever to read, share, and tell stories about the barriers immigrants and people of color face in America, and My Other Heart refuses to sanitize the realities of it, even while framing it as a tale of love and belonging.
Told from rotating perspectives, we’re shown how each person is feeling and how messy their interactions and emotions can be. The central characters are always believable in their wants and needs, even if you can recognize that what they want isn’t always what’s best for them. And more often than not, what they experience is too complicated for anyone to navigate without getting hurt. Depending on who’s narrating, their voices and influences shine through even as their thoughts bleed into one another; you get the feeling you’re never too far away from the other characters, even if their threads haven’t been pulled together yet.
Sabrina and Kit’s perspectives are both colored by their respective upbringings, with the added influence of being young and naive to the world. Their desire for connection and acceptance—from adults, their peers, and their first loves—is as poignant as it is endearing. But Mimi’s point of view is the most heartwrenching of them all, as you see her regret over that fateful day pierced with shards of hope for her daughter.
The central mystery surrounding Mimi’s missing child is a slow burn; the novel’s pacing meanders and takes a while to settle into, but the last act will steal your breath away. While you might want more closure and development for the characters, My Other Heart does well to remind you that life isn’t always tied up in a neat little bow; sometimes, people go their whole lives forever changed by a single fleeting moment.
