Cover Image: Chemistry

Chemistry

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Member Reviews

This novel is about a woman trying to find herself after seemingly on towards a path of success and a good life. The book isn't smooth in transitions, however, I think it's really a play into what's going on in the main character's thinking. Wang is a brilliant writer and I will read whatever books she publishes.

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The story resonated with me personally but I didn’t always love the written material. Overall I would recommend it to the right readers.

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I wasn't sure I was going to like one too much, but I had kept hearing about it. I'm glad I read it! Although it was little scattered, I enjoyed the soul searching story. I gave it 3 stars because it did take me longer than usual to get through, however I would recommend this to a friend.

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I found this book to be very multilayered and insightful. It explored growing up Chinese American, as an only child, language barriers, parental affection and what it means for different cultures, romantic love and what that means from one person to another, the idea of self pressure to succeed and what it means when we fail our own and our families expectations, mental health and self assessment, and what it means to look inward. The somewhat stilted, abruptness of the narrative text really complemented the main character's inner thought process and ways of looking at her life. I felt that once I got used to that rhythm and lack of chapter breaks, I almost felt truly inside her mind as she observed the world around her and tried to figure out what she wanted vs expectations. The ultimate kind of "love" story was also really different because it was about what a person really needs vs what she should settle for because it looks good from the outside. Sometimes we need to examine ourselves before we can commit to another person, as nonsensical as it may appear on the outside.

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I very much liked this little book. The main character is a woman in graduate school, in a good relationship, until she's not either of those things. Themes of friendship, parenting, belonging, and what it's like to be the child of immigrants all blend together in a really beautiful way. I found much of it very funny, although it certainly isn't a comedy. It's uncommon to see a serious, thoughtful, funny, dark, messed up female character in contemporary literature who doesn't morph into something like the "normal" girl. And it was refreshing to see that "normal" wasn't the goal.

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Chemistry is hilariously funny. If you find unresolved childhood issues, heartbreak and the collapse of one's life plan funny. The Asian-American narrator of Chemistry is a failed PhD student ergo a failed Asian daughter. Though she is well aware that she is a failure, she had previously thought she was only a failed girlfriend unable to respond to her live-in boyfriend's marriage proposal. At his urging, she delves into her fear of intimacy which does not prevent him from moving on at which point she needs to reconsider her life unmoored by everything that had held it in place until then. Chemistry. Her boyfriend. Her parents. Her inability to connect with people around her is comic as is her journey towards connection. Chemistry is a reminder to anyone who survived their 20s of the growing pains and a signal to anyone still in their 20s that they too will get through it albeit for a few hiccups along the way.

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In this debut novel, an unnamed young female scientist questions her career path, her relationship and the role of her parents in her life. The short and quippy prose vary between stream of consciousness thinking, rhetorical questions and memories from the narrator’s past. The struggling, yet insightful, tone paves the journey of a woman who must figure out how to find fulfillment through her confused beliefs. This unique story and voice is bound to please coming of age fans.

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A short novel that explores the pain of discovering that you lack both the talent and the passion to realize your lifelong goal. When the narrator quits her PhD program, she’s forced to grapple with the complicated relationship she has with her parents, her inability to commit to her devoted boyfriend, and most of all who she is now that she has lost her professional calling. With the help of a therapist and the therapy of helping others as a tutor, she slowly reveals a life that’s been lived through a prism of chemistry. While it might seem narrowly defined and unusually detached, it’s also beautifully observed. Life is kept at a careful distance, no one except Eric has a name, not even her best friend, until slowly she starts to open up, offering the possibility of finding feeling, and herself again.

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Meh; solid 3 stars.

Another author trying to branch out stylistically by using the present tense, but not really focusing on plot or character. The narrator of the book is so affectless, it's hard to care for her or her bizarre life choices. The only parts that had heart and felt "real" dealt with her parents -- even that flirted with cliche.

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'Chemistry' is a subtle and engaging novel that left me anticipating whatever Weike Wang writes next. First, it's very funny. Let me rephrase that: it contains some very funny writing. One reason the novel works is the contrast between a fundamentally dark story of a young woman navigating an emotional breakdown and her humorous insights into incidents and people in her life. These include Chinese immigrant parents with exacting expectations of their only child, a best friend whose live unravels after she has a baby, and a meltdown in pursuit of her Ph.D. in chemistry at a prestigious school.

Naturally, chemistry threads its way through the novel: as the burden of achievement that the protagonist accepts from her parents; in her inability--using an alternate definition of the word--to trust her future with her kind boyfriend; and in the tension between fact and feeling and between knowledge and uncertainty. The writing belies this tension even as it reveals the difficulty the character has in confronting her feelings and acting on them. Her growing awareness and transition over time are consistently believable and entirely compelling.

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A stream of consciousness book that occasionally pulled me in, but it just couldn't keep me there. Ultimately, I found it more boring than engaging. So, overall disappointing.

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<blockquote>
So why did I leave science again? ... Was it because I didn't like it or I wasn't good enough to do it?

<br>

Does it matter?
</blockquote>

<p>Maybe this book won't resonate with people who aren't like me and the narrator: people who've left science. Or maybe it will. Everyone has left something behind. Maybe that feeling of loss is universal? If not, maybe I'm not the one to review this book because it read like the internal monologue that goes on in my head when I can't sleep, or when I'm walking to the mailbox, or when I'm driving to the library, or whenever there isn't anything to distract me from my own thoughts. Our narrator leaves science (chemistry) and then has to decide whether to follow her boyfriend, who is still nuzzled into science's temperamental embrace, to a small town where he has gotten a job. I left science (math) and then had to decide whether to follow my husband, who is still nuzzled into science's (math) temperamental embrace, to a small town where he has gotten a job.</p>

<blockquote>
I am the girl who followed you and I know what happens to those girls. They are never happy and then they carry that unhappiness everywhere.
</blockquote>

<p>I detached myself from reading this, otherwise I would have gone mad. I didn't have any beakers to destroy, like the narrator, but I would have if I had some. This book gave me the plunging feeling in ribs of having made the wrong decision all over again. I know every feeling, the narrator's every feeling. Detach all I want, doesn't work when I've been emptied out like this.</p>

<p>Maybe go find an English major. Maybe their review will give a dispassionate appraisal. Reading my own truth and mine doesn't.</p>

<p><A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/18770083/book/141833391">Chemistry</a> by Weike Wang went on sale May 23, 2017.</p>

<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>

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As a chemistry student, this book really spoke to me!

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Book review
Title: Chemistry
Author: Weike Wang
Genre: YA/Science
Rating: ****
Review: The opening to Chemistry was good, it is told in a third person perspective which isn't my favourite to read but I was intrigued by the scientific aspects of this novel. The protagonist is worrying about her life especially her relationship with Eric as he keeps asking her about marriage and children but these things don't fit into her analytical life. She also finds her passion for chemistry waking as times goes on and she reanalyse her life and where she wants to go in the future.
As we approach the 1/4 mark in the novel we see the protagonist have a slight mental breakdown as she knows her relationship, her love of chemistry and her academic life are all going downhill. The protagonist reminisces about her turbulent and difficult children as her family immigrated from China, the breakdown of her parents relationship and how she and Eric have almost nothing in common. When Eric suggests she seeks psychiatric help she immediately dismisses the idea. Although after some thought and encouragement she does being to visit a therapist where she is told she has some anger issues which come out in semi violent bursts like the beaker incident.
As we cross the 1/4 mark in the novel we see the protagonist`s life speak further and further out of control. She thinks of her relationship with and the relationship with her parents and what they give her. She also thinks of her Chinese heritage and how her mother resents her for becoming American and how her mother resents her father for moving them away from China. She also knows that if Eric has to move for work that she won't follow him but she also won't make him stay because of this their relationship has stagnated and he is trying to help her understand but she doesn't really want to. She also wants to quit her PhD and do something else but she doesn't know what. Because of her lack of focus she also loses her tutoring rule and does nothing except the domestic tasks like walking the dog, thinking always thinking but never acting.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel we see the protagonist going nowhere she refuses to accept she has problems even when she is kicked out of university and has to find another or when Eric leaves her because he wants to make something of himself while she is content to do nothing. As we cross into the second part of the novel she tries to analyse the lives of the people around her like her parents, Eric and her best friend and why they make the decisions they have but no matter how hard she tries she just can't understand them. I did like how many different diverse aspects were added like national identify, social class and gender to name are few. The protagonist tries to understand why other people think there is something wrong with her life when she herself can't see the issues but she also learning to be happy within her own skin rather than try and please everyone. The final pages of this novel were great, the protagonist is progressing and finding herself and is beginning to realise what she wants from life rather than what she has been programmed to want.

Overall, Chemistry was good, I really liked the scientific elements of this book and is often used to mirror the character's personalities. This book is a single person's journey of self-discovery and outside that not a lot happens but I did really enjoy the light and contemporary feel of the novel.

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CHEMISTRY is a wonderful debut novel by Weike Wang. The cover itself conveys the subtlety and simplicity of this author's writing – yes, the story has to do with chemistry, although not just the science itself, but also the chemistry between people and within a person.

The unnamed narrator is a 20 something woman, the only child of parents who emigrated from China to the United States. She and her live-in boyfriend, Eric, are pursuing PhD's in Boston. He is having success with his experiments; she, not so much. He wants to get married; she's not so sure. He had a happy childhood and supportive parents; she is still struggling with expectations. The novel is written in a unique manner – almost a stream of consciousness from the narrator about relationships and conversations with Eric, her family and others (including an unnamed best friend, a therapist, and her thesis adviser). Her sense of identity and self-worth are definitely at risk as she becomes disillusioned with her work, remarking, "The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The chemist sees the glass completely full, half in liquid state and half in gaseous, both of which are probably poisonous."

Read CHEMISTRY to get inside the head of a young person trying to deal with questions of what she should do with her life amidst the pressures from others. It is an honest, sometimes funny and often surprising introspection from an obviously troubled, but appealing, soul.

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Yes, this is another novel about an unmoored millenial but Wang's writing and her protagonist really make it stand out from the pack. This is a concise well told tale of a young Chinese American scientist who is questioning all she knows. Haven't we all done that at one time or another? There's no whining here. Wang skillfully blends her theme of chemistry as another character. The "backstory" is spooled out as meticulously as a chemistry experiment; the book is all the better for it. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I'm looking forward to more from Wang.

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An interesting little read. It reminded me a bit of "Lab Girl" by Hope Jahren but funnier. You can read it pretty quickly too. It's probably even more interesting to academic folks but can be enjoyed by anyone.

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Approaching both the condition of women scientists and the pressure towards success in immigrant - Asian - families, the book fails, in my opinion, to deliver something new or at least a well told story.

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I think of myself as being pretty smart, but it turned out what I was sure I wanted to do at 16 was incredibly wrong for me. And the protagonist (never named) of Weike Wang's Chemistry is in kind of a similar boat. Pursuing a Ph.D. in, of course, chemistry at a prestigious New England university, she has a bit of a meltdown as her experiment fails to produce results. Although she does love the field, she begins to question her choices about everything in life as she takes time off of her program.

There's not a lot of "plot" in this book, really The protagonist is trying to decide what to do about her long-term relationship with a fellow chemist who has proposed to her but she's not sure she wants to marry, trying to figure out how to support herself without her graduate student stipend, supporting her best friend through pregnancy and early motherhood and marriage crises, and figuring out when and how and if to tell her Chinese immigrant parents that she's not in school anymore. It is this last matter that most preoccupies her, and much of the book is made up of her recollections of her childhood, of her parents' relationships with each other and with her, of the pressure she feels to succeed in the ways that they value in order to validate their sacrifices.

Stories like these illustrate the power of "own voices": an Asian-American woman telling the story of an Asian-American woman. A lot of non-Asians look to them as a so-called "model minority", hard workers somehow naturally gifted at math and science. Of course the reality behind that is more complicated (it's as much a result of the kinds of immigrants that tend to leave Asia behind to travel to America as much as anything else), and Wang pulls back the curtain on what might seem like a neat little family of a scientist, a housewife, and their scientist daughter to show the internal workings that are just as messy as anyone's home life.

That being said, evaluating Chemistry on its novelistic merits reveals a book that is good but not great, and quite obviously a debut, though a promising one. Our nameless narrator is at times rather formless, and mostly reacts to the events around her rather than being proactive. She's very unsure of herself after breaking out a track that she found herself in more than chose, and while that's understandable, it makes her hard to really get enough of a feel of for to connect with much. But Wang's writing is sure and emotionally true, and I enjoyed this book and would recommend it, especially to 20somethings that are wondering if they're on the right track.

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