A clipped, funny, painfully honest narrative voice lights up Wang's debut novel about a Chinese-American graduate student who finds the scientific method inadequate for understanding her parents, her boyfriend, or herself. The optimist sees the glass as half-full, the pessimist half-empty, explains the narrator, while a chemist sees it as half-liquid, half-gaseous, probably poisonous. At 27, this aspiring chemist has reached a point in her research at which, seeing no progress, her thesis advisor suggests changing topics. Instead, she has a breakdown in the lab, smashing beakers and shouting until security guards are called. Her romantic relationship also reaches a turning point when her boyfriend takes a job out of state. The thought of relocation elicits the narrator's unhappy memories of her family's emigration from Shanghai to Detroit when she was five: her father learned English, worked hard, became an engineer, but her mother, a pharmacist in China, never quite adapted. Caught between parents, languages, and cultures, the narrator devotes herself to academic study. Only after her best friend has a baby does she begin to comprehend love, the one power source, according to Einstein, man has never mastered. Wang offers a unique blend of scientific observations, Chinese proverbs, and American movie references. In spare prose, characters remain unnamed, except for boyfriend Eric and the baby, nicknamed "Destroyer." Descriptions of the baby's effect on adults and adults' effect on a dog demonstrate Wang's gift for perspective-the dog's, the chemist's, the immigrant parents, and, most intimately, their bright, quirky, conflicted daughter. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

BLIND SPOT, by Teju Cole. (Random House, $40.) This lyrical essay in photographs paired with texts explores the mysteries of the ordinary. Cole's questioning, tentative habit of mind, suspending judgment while hoping for the brief miracle of insight, is a form of what used to be called humanism. MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS, by Emil Ferris. (Fantagraphics, paper, $39.99.) In this graphic novel, drawn entirely on blue-lined notebook paper, a monster-loving 10-year-old in 1960s Chicago tries to make sense of a neighbor's death, her mother's decline from cancer, and her crush on another girl. The story is punctuated by drawings of the covers of the horror magazines she loves. CHEMISTRY, by Weike Wang. (Knopf, $24.95.) A Chinese-American graduate student struggles to find her place in the world, arguing with her parents about whether she can give up her Ph.D. and wondering whether to marry her boyfriend. Wang's debut novel is both honest and funny. CATTLE KINGDOM: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, by Christopher Knowlton. (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $29.) The 20-year grand era of cowboys and cattle barons is a story of boom and bust. Knowlton's deftnarrative is filled with sharp observations about cowboys and fortune-hunters. THEFT BY FINDING: Diaries (1977-2002), by David Sedaris. (Little, Brown, $28.) Over 25 years, these diaries mutate from a stress vent, to limbering-up exercises for the kind of writing Sedaris is going to do, to rough drafts. His developing voice - graceful, whining, hilarious - is the lifeline that pulls him through. TOWN IS BY THE SEA, by Joanne Schwartz. Illustrated by Sydney Smith. (Groundwood/House of Anansi, $19.95; ages 5 to 9.) This evocation of daily life in a picturesque, run-down seaside town in the 1950s stirs timeless, elemental emotions. The ocean light is contrasted with the coal mine far below, where a boy's father works and where he is destined (and resigned) to follow. OTIS REDDING: An Unfinished Life, by Jonathan Gould. (Crown Archetype, $30.) It's hard to write about Redding; he died at 26 and no one has anything nasty to say about him. Gould relies on interviews with his surviving family members and exhaustive research into his early years as a performer to tell his story. THE COMPLETE STORIES, by Leonora Carrington. Translated by Kathrine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan. (Dorothy, paper, $16.) The Surrealist painter and fabulist wrote 25 fantastical and droll stories in English, Spanish and French. COCKFOSTERS: Stories, by Helen Simpson. (Knopf, $23.95.) Nine tales offer memorable characters, comic timing, originality, economy, poignancy and heart. Although they are entertaining, the mortality and the passage of time is an underlying theme. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

The unnamed heroine in this touching fiction is plagued with uncertainty. She is a Chinese American woman struggling to earn a doctorate in chemistry when her white boyfriend proposes marriage. Contemplating the notion of matrimony after witnessing her own parents' bitter union, fearing failure in the lab, and growing increasingly depressed, she has a destructive breakdown. As she tries to resurface, she questions everything, and science offers the answers. This brief yet potent debut asks profound questions with an altogether unique voice. Imagine a blend of Chris from Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Lydia from Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, and you may begin to know the protagonist. Wang addresses, in sparse staccato prose, a wide range of topics-romance, friendship, mental illness, dogs, science, and Chinese American culture across generations-with quirky scientific anecdotes that serve as tangential diversions. VERDICT This funny and unforgettable book will appeal to thoughtful teens who like humor with a serious undercurrent.-Tara Kehoe, formerly at the New Jersey State Library Talking Book and Braille Center, Trenton © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Equal parts intense and funny novel about one woman's breakdown.The endearing unnamed narrator is a Chinese immigrant working toward her Ph.D. in chemistry at Boston University. When her kind and well-adjusted boyfriend, Eric, asks her to marry him, she is, far from being thrilled, ambivalent. Her indecision throws them into a state of limbo, as he waits to hear whether he will be offered a job in Ohio and she struggles to complete her doctorate by solving her scientific problem in the lab. The only child of an extremely demanding, rageful father and a bitter, beautiful, neglectful mother, the narrator was raised in a house of anger and violence. This makes it difficult for her to accept Eric's lovehe had such a wonderful childhood that he can't even name the worst thing his parents ever said. She has always been a scientist, quiet and focused, shutting out emotionsher childhood being what it was, the onslaught of emotions, were she to allow them in, would be too much. Eventually, she can repress no longer and has something of a mental breakdownquitting her studies, drinking excessively, hiding out. It is this breakdown from which, over the course of the novel, she makes an incremental return to stability, finding comfort in the love of her anxious dog, her best friend and her best friend's baby, her therapist's questions, and eventually one of the older students she has been tutoring. Though essentially unhinged, the narrator is thoughtful and funny, her scramble understandable. It is her voicedistinctive and appealingthat makes this novel at once moving and amusing, never predictable. Wry, unique, touching tale of the limits of parental and partnership pressure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

DEBUT After spontaneously cutting off eight inches of hair, Wang's never-named narrator returns to her chemistry lab and smashes five beakers. She insists, "Beakers are cheap," yet the personal price is inestimable: the shattered vessels parallel an equal number of portentous changes involving her PhD program, her boyfriend, her parents, her understanding of her own self, the future she expected. As the only child of demanding Chinese immigrants, she's always been an achiever-until she isn't. Having witnessed more angry accusations than nurturing support between her parents, she's panicked rather than joyful by her boyfriend's marriage proposal. While he applies for teaching appointments, she distracts herself with alcohol, the dog, and occasional calls to her pregnant best friend in another city. Untethered, she must discover the right formula that might propel her forward. Despite a captivating opening and poignant ending, the muddled middle devolves into tedious clichés, from the near-perfect child fearful of disappointing her tiger parents to the culturally blinded, privileged white man to the over-achieving new mother with the philandering husband. VERDICT Wang, herself a Harvard chemistry major, debuts what could have been a clever, witty novel of self-discovery. More affective might ultimately have been a distilled short story.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.