The Song Behind Today’s Review Title

“Sharp words like knives” are hurled in a fight between parents in the 2015 song Broken Home. The song is from the second studio album released by the Australian band 5 Seconds of Summer. The band of four teenagers first gained fame by posting cover songs on YouTube. Here are two of the four (Calum Hood and Luke Hemmings) in a 2013 YouTube video covering Ed Sheeren’s The A-Team.

The band’s 2014 self-titled debut album reached number one on charts in ten countries, including the US and Canada, and represented the height of their popularity on this side of the Pacific. The band is probably best known in the US for their 2014 hit She Looks So Perfect.

Broken Home focuses on the breakdown of the relationship between two parents from the viewpoint of their child. The dysfunctional family relationship of today’s featured book is mostly between two sisters, with a father barely spoken of, and a mother who refuses to acknowledge the war raging between her daughters, as more than sharp words are hurled.

You can hear Broken Home here on YouTube.

Ellie has a problem. Well, she has several actually. First, her sister keeps trying to kill her. Second, her mother is in a coma. Third, her sister tasks her with a cleanup of the underpinnings of the universe that Ellie is not thrilled to take on, and which turns into more than she bargained for.

John Chu’s debut novel The Subtle Art of Folding Space combines the dysfunctional dynamics of an immigrant family with a physics-bending multiverse-spanning scf-fi crisis. Ellie’s family, it turns out, are part of an underground group of people who keep our universe humming along as it should be. They do this by designing, building, maintaining and verifying a series of, well, I’m not sure what to call them - some kind of machines - that stop anomalies from cropping up and knocking our reality for a loop.

The metaphors for all those machines come from the worlds of plumbing, mechanics and computer science. Ellie and her compatriots work on pipes, valves, gears, gates, etc. There is some internal logic to the concept Chu puts forth but it’s pseudoscience rather than “hard science” fiction in this part of the story.

The family dynamics however would seem to spring from Chu’s real-world knowledge or even personal experience. Chu is a gay Taiwanese American author. The family is Taiwanese American and one of the main characters is Ellie’s gay cousin Daniel.

The book is written with a light tone, and with plenty of comic relief. Even the explanations of what the machines do and why they need fixing are not too deep - just enough explanation is given to support the story. Like the pseudoscience of a Star Trek episode, the science-y mumbo jumbo sounds good coming out of the character’s mouths, even if the science itself may be suspect.

Star Trek seems like a good reference point. If you are a fan of Star Trek or are comfortable with the pseudoscience-y part of the science fiction / fantasy spectrum, then this book will be a natural fit for you. If you are more of a fan of the knights and dragons at the fantasy end of science fiction / fantasy, this book will likely be a stretch.

Despite the light tone and the pseudoscience, the family drama is fairly serious, and Ellie’s struggle with her sister seems plausible, and grounded in realistic family tensions. Resolving this drama is the heart of the book. I fell for both the family drama and the pseudoscience and found this a quick and enjoyable read.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐

OVERALL COMMENTS: Debut novel by the Hugo and Nebula Award winning short story author. Read it for the immigrant family drama and the quirky multiverse spanning sci-fi crisis.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I received an advance reviewer’s copy of the ebook through NetGalley, and courtesy of the publisher Tor Books. The book is available to the public starting today, April 07, 2026.

The other books on my nightstand over the last week:

ONE BOOK I’VE READ

I finished American Scoundrel, a biography of Dan Sickles. Sickles was a pre-Civil War New York politician. As a Tammany Hall Democrat, he was well liked by his constituents, but among his peers he earned a reputation for accumulating debt and frequenting ladies of the evening. He went on to marry (which did not put a stop to his sexual adventuring). But it was his wife’s infidelity that led to scandal, and then to murder. Sickles goes on from that to become an important figure for the Union during the Civil War.

The book bogs down during the murder trial but is otherwise entertaining and enlightening. It’s amazing both how much, and how little, social mores have changed in the last hundred and fifty-ish years. Three and a Half Stars ⭐⭐⭐🌠

TWO BOOKS I’M CURRENTLY READING

I’ve made some progress on the book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell, but I’m afraid I may have to set it aside for a bit, because I have two others that I need to finish and review for you next week. Bell’s book has an interesting premise - that the American War for Independence was actually a World War in everything but name. I’ll be eager to get back to it.

WHAT’S NEXT

Next week I’ll be reviewing The National Road and The Faith of Beasts. The first is the story of the first highway built with federal funding. A vision of our first president, the National Road eventually stretched from Cumberland, Maryland to Vandalia, Illinois. The first time I ever heard of the National Road was when I encountered a portion it in Indiana. That portion forms part of the route of the one day 160-mile-long Ride Across INdiana (RAIN) organized bike ride, which I did one year back in the 2010s.

The second book I’ll review next week also happens to be the second in The Captive’s War series of sci-fi novels by James S.A. Corey, the nom de plume of the writing duo behind The Expanse novels.