Brilliant, haunting, devastating — these are just some of the adjectives being used to describe the new book “Four Treasures of the Sky” by Jenny Tinghue Zhang. She’s a Chinese-American writer, and this is her first novel.

The book is about a Chinese girl who is kidnapped and smuggled to America, traveling from a San Francisco brothel to a shop in the Idaho mountains. And it tells the tale not only of one girl but of the pain caused by the Chinese exclusion act in a small chapter of Chinese-American history.

The City Club of Boise is bringing Zhang to Boise on March 4 for a reading and conversation, and she joined Idaho Matters for a preview.