Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author John Chu’s debut novel is part science fiction, part fantasy, and all emotion. Like much of Chu’s short fiction, The Subtle Art of Folding Space is a unique tale that explores family relationships, the nature of belonging, and the softer side of at least one hunky man who can lift a lot of weight.

Ellie knows how to keep all the universes running. Her mother, Vera, taught her everything about being a builder who repairs the skunkworks, the ancient plumbing of Ellie’s universe and every other universe nested inside it. Infinite universes and skunkworks exist, and maintaining them is crucial. The universes’ physics will be compromised if anomalies in the skunkworks’ gates and valves aren’t fixed.

When Ellie encounters one such anomaly keeping her comatose mother alive, she knows that leaving the faulty area alone is out of the question; Vera would never let such an irregularity persist. So, Ellie corrects it, and her mother dies. The fix was the right thing to do. Vera’s illness had gone on for an inexplicable amount of time, after all, and caused a great deal of suffering.

Still, few see Ellie’s action as a professional responsibility or a necessary kindness. Now, her colleagues don’t trust her. Worse, she’s blamed by much of her Taiwanese American family for causing Vera’s death. Ellie’s sister, Chris, piles on the guilt with a ferocity even greater than what she uses to stage assassination attempts of Ellie. The intriguing relationship between the sisters provides the novel’s emotional heart. Chris says the assassination attempts are to keep Ellie sharp in case isolationists try to kill her. In reality, she’s jealous of Ellie’s bond with their deceased mom.

For her part, Ellie suspects something more was going on with her mother’s anomaly, and her cousin Daniel thinks the same. He’s the only one who understands why Ellie did what she did. The two have been friends since they were kids. Daniel is a skunkworks verifier, someone who checks “whether architects have designed the right thing and whether they have designed the thing right.” His reputation is for sternness, but he’s kind to everyone — from his sad, often-rejected cousin, Ellie, to his hot, opera-singing boyfriend, Belt.

The skunkworks may appear chaotic, but the way Daniel probes anomalies and verifies corrections appears perfect. Most verifier reports come out as something crystalline; his manifest as food, perhaps even a “bright yellow custard” that “sits inside a pale, blonde serrated crust.” Sumptuous dishes appear not only in Daniel’s verifier reports but also in elaborate meals that might include “chili-flecked cucumbers next to thin slices of radish next to tangles of sesame-specked pig ears” or “garlic fried rice with soy-ginger glazed tilapia.”

The reader may struggle to recall Ellie’s appearance, but through her eyes, everything about Daniel is known. He’s “lithe and stocky at the same time, as though he were the runt of a family of impossibly elegant giants.” His voice is “the rustle of leaves and the rush of water as it smooths rocks.” When Daniel lifts a car so that a jack can be placed underneath, “The only giveaway that it takes him any effort at all is that he lifts the car with exquisite form.”

Like Ellie, Daniel wonders who installed the anomaly related to Aunt Vera and why it was allowed to persist. A larger conspiracy is suspected, perhaps even one that includes isolationists. Just like her efforts to connect with Chris, Ellie’s attempts to investigate the anomaly’s origins keep coming to nothing. Only when the Chief Architect of the skunkworks brings her and Daniel into her confidence is it clear that various factions are hiding something.

To uncover what’s going on, Ellie will need to embrace the mysteries of the skunkworks and those of her broken family. Watching her face her insecurities and use her technical skills to forge ahead makes The Subtle Art of Folding Space a fast-paced adventure that is both wildly creative and fully absorbing.

Andrea M. Pawley lives and writes in Washington, DC, her favorite city in the whole world.