Sour Heart was hard for me to get into. It took a while to really pull some sort of connection to it, which made it difficult.

When I started reading this book I was so interested, however, when the first sentences went on for a pages, I quickly came to see that I wasn't in the right mindset for it. I understand that this is written as if coming from immigrants who are not fluent in English. I did mark this on a shelf to possible pick up at a later time but I just couldn't get into it now. Thank you for the advanced copy.

I honestly do not know where to start. It's been a long time since a book has left me feeling so unsettled for lack of better terminology. The book is a collection of stories told from the viewpoints of young girls that immigrated to NYC in the 90's with their parents from China and Taiwan. This is a very important collection of stories that I do believe help the reader put themselves in others shoes and realize how fortunate their lives have been. The first story " We Love You Crispina" sort of reaches out and grabs a hold of you. The descriptions of the poor living conditions, the lack of food, and racism is pretty graphic. There was a scene involving regurgitated food that almost made me gag my damn self. The rest of the chapters were filled with shocking, perverse, and even uncomfortable sexual interactions. It was a tough read for sure. I actually had to put it down a few times. I really liked the way the author wrote in very plain and brash language because to be honest that voice is what makes the book so memorable. I would not recommend this for young adults under the age of 18 because of the sometimes graphic nature of the stories. Thank you NetGalley for the chance to leave my honest review on this book.

I appreciate Jenny Zhang, author of “Sour Heart” for her unique and unusual style of writing. “Sour Hearts is a novel with several short stories it.
The genres for this book are Literary Fiction with a touch of personal History that the author has based this on and used her Poetic License for. I do admire Jenny Zhang for “shooting from the hip”. The author holds nothing back.
For that reason I do want to issue a warning to people who might be sensitive to the use of bodily functions, and some scenes of violence, and some strong language, this might not be for you. For those readers that enjoy a different and unique experience, you probably might like this.
I find it very difficult to review a book with different short stories in it. First of all, I enjoyed some stories more than others. Then, it would take forever to review each story.
The stories take place in China, and the timeline goes back to “The Revolution” in China, where schools were closed and children would wildly roam the streets. The children could turn their parents in for any infraction. The stories are told as Chinese immigrants come to the United States and are faced with poverty and living in slum conditions. The stories are told of young Chinese women coming of age and the struggles they deal with. (emotional and sexual) Through the characters eyes, and their views of being discriminated, we see their discrimination to others Koreans and Black people. In one case, one young Chinese girl befriend a Black woman.
The characters are complex, and complicated, and many come from a dysfunctional setting. The author write about families, grandparents, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, dysfunction, honor, love and struggle. This is a story of self-discovery and growth. I would recommend this story for those readers that like a unique and unusual approach. I received this book for my honest review.

These are hilarious and terrifying accounts of growing up on the edge. Chinese immigrants struggling to get by in the meanest sense. The squalor, the violence, the racism, the fog of living in a place where language is a barrier, where there’s no context for anything. These are super tough girls with wonderfully foul mouths, growing up fast, trying desperately to escape their helpless innocence yet naive and needing so much to have the love of their parents, of wanting to belong. There are parents who work so hard, are willing to sacrifice so much for their children, who have complicated lives full of disappointments, haunted by the Cultural Revolution, who love each other yet can’t always treat each other right. The girls age with each story, so in a way, it is like the same girl growing up, gradually making her way through school, life, ending up at Stanford. I thought the writing was really confident, raw, really funny in parts, it captured a life that I felt like I could have experienced, and people whom I could have known, though not really, not the details, but maybe the essence of the emotions. It kind of reminded me of We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo.

Short story collection about immigrant families. This book is not for everyone, Some of the situations and language is a bit harsh at times. Some may find the subject matters of this book a put off. The first short story is the best, " We Love You Crispina". I found "The Empty" very hard to digest. I do understand that the book is short stories, but the stories felt like they were lacking something. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

Thank You to Random House Publishing Group for providing me with an advance copy of Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart: Stories, in exchange for an honest review.

PLOT - Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart: Stories is a collection of connected stories following Chinese immigrants living in New York. There is a heavy emphasis on young, female characters, who are trying to understand both their new country and their parents, who lived through China's cultural revolution.

LIKE- I grew up in a middle-class, culturally diverse neighborhood and many of my close friends are Chinese. Despite experiencing diversity in my life, I've realized that my reading selections are not as diverse as they could and should be. I'm grateful that Zhang's Sour Heart: Stories found its way to my TBR Pile. 

I was most interested in the parts that focused on the family relationships, specifically the differences between growing up during the Cultural Revolution and this new generation, that is growing up in America. There is a huge challenge with regard to communication between the generations. The challenge isn't limited to the generations, it also comes with the different perspectives of the immigrants. Although they all arrive in America with little in way of possessions or money and they meet as strangers sharing a cramped apartment, each family does come from a different background and brings their unique perspective. Zhang's stories are filled with a huge variety of character experiences.

My favorite story was the last chapter, one dealing with the title character who has been nicknamed Sour Heart for her love of sour foods. In the last story, she is an adult examining the relationship she has with her relatives, both her parents and relatives in China. It's complicated and includes so many layers. How do you bond with blood when you live so far away and have had such differences in your life? 

DISLIKE- As much as I admire Zhang's storytelling, I have to admit that I felt a disconnect. I found the sections of the girls trying to fit in to their American schools, to be less engaging. Some of their behavior and frank sex talk didn't ring true to my childhood experience and it was hard to connect. 

RECOMMEND- Yes. Sour Heart: Stories was uneven for me, but I'd still recommend it. I've not been exposed to many other fictional stories on this subject and for diversity reasons, Sour Heart: Stories is a worthy read. When I was engaged in Zhang's writing, she absolutely shined and I felt moved by her characters and prose. I look forward to discovering more of her writing.

Did not finish. The explicit sexual exploitation of children by children was too ugly.

This book was right up my alley! I love a good collection of short stories, and this collection was just beautiful, and moving, and everything I didn't know I needed.

Multiple sad stories about immigrant families living in New York during the 90's
All stories were interesting or compelling.but very hard to read ...to much sexual content for my taste.

I recommend you read it for yourself and form your own opinion.

My thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

So real, raw, and penetrating that Sour Heart was, in parts, as hard to read as it was impossible not to. Razor-sharp without mercy. Observant. Insightful. Highly recommend.
MM Finck
Women Writers, Women's Books
booksbywomen.org

I couldn't finish this one. This collection of short stories aims to be a unique perspective on immigration and growing up in New York City in the 90s. And I guess it succeeds in being unique... but not in a good way. I enjoyed the writing, which is often written in a conversational, run-on way. However, I couldn't get past the content. There was a lot of sexual content involving children (including non-consensual). Honestly I was disgusted by the second story, and it was at that point that I decided I didn't want to read any more. This book is published by Lena Dunham's publishing imprint, Lenny, and if you remember any of the controversy that arose after the publication of her memoir, you can get a tiny idea of what Sour Heart contains. While some people have obviously not had an issue with it, I don't want to read something that treats stuff like this in such a non-consequential manner.

Sour Hearts: Stories consists of seven short stories. The author gives voice to young Chinese-American girls living in New York. Some of the characters are witty, some precocious and, perhaps, vulnerable to some extent. All are interesting individuals. The stories deal with important issues including family dynamics, poverty and assimilation to a new culture. Some of the stories are not easy to read, but the one commonality is that they all well written and engrossing.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Thank you to Random House Publishing - Lenny and NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is one of those books where you really need to read the summary carefully before picking it up. I did not realize it was a collection of stories but once I realized it was I felt compelled to finish the book (that's the reader in me I guess). Anyways, the stories are okay. I felt some were written better than others and those were the stories I breezed through but once I put the book down I didn't feel like picking it back up. Honestly, I could see this being a great graduation gift for a teenage girl about to enter the real world but other than that I would not recommend this book.

**Review will be published to blog on 31 Jul 2017 at 10:00AM EST**

I chose this book because:

I support Asian-American authors and stories about the Asian-American experience. Also, I was sold by the line “girls struggling to define themselves."

Upon reading this book:

My parents shielded me from a lot of the world such that all I had to worry about was doing well in school; my happiness and everything else, they took care of. I’m not grateful enough for all that I have, for all that my parents have given me. Thus, I was unfamiliar with the struggles of these immigrant families in these stories because I’ve never had any real struggles in life. Rather, I identified with the children whose lives were easy because their parents had worked hard to make a life for them in America.

Though I was unfamiliar with the struggle myself, these stories reminded me that my parents are people too, that they’re not superheroes, that I only think that they are because they work so hard and love me so much, that they have had to overcome so much, that they have had to bury so much to make me feel so safe. My parents' stories are not the same as the ones in the book, but they had and have their own struggles too. At the very least, it’s safe to say that it’s not as easy to make it in America for people of colour as it is for white people.

The stories are told by different people but all in first person. This threw me off at first because the tone of all the stories is the same, but it didn’t bother me because I quite liked the tone and didn’t mind following it throughout the collection. There was so much of the book I wanted to quote, but that often meant I’d have to quote whole paragraphs or pages, such was my love for this collection. While this is a good piece of literary work, it wasn’t so much the poetry of the words but the meaning of the words that really struck a chord with me.

I slowly absorbed Sour Heart one story at a time. Zhang has a strong voice and style that feels very developed for a young author. I would recommend reading it for the relatable details of girlhood. It obviously reflects the tone of Lena Dunham's work and makes sense as the first collection on her new imprint.

Sour Heart is a collection of seven short stories by Jenny Zhang. Zhang’s prose has a fresh informality that is exciting to read. Her stories are full of new imagery like her “oozy desire” to catch up to her parents in sacrifice to her anger when she feels like a balled up fist incapable of unclenching.

The first and last stories feature Cristina. Other stories are of the families that shared the same crowded living space with Cristina’s family or knew her family. One story goes back and forth from China to the US, and back and forth in time, recounting the cruel excesses of the Cultural Revolution when children turned on their parents. The stories are narrated by young girls, fourth-graders and high school students and often focus on the pressures parents place on their children through their own unending sacrifices, their multiple jobs and endless work to get ahead so their children can have a better life.



I think Zhang writes beautifully and admired her skill at crafting sentences and describing people and situations. She has an amazing ability to describe emotional turmoil and childhood angst. I would love to love this collection. But I can’t.

The narrators run together, how is Mandee different from Cristina? I would be hard-pressed to tell you. They all have parents who are hard working. They all have parents who place inappropriate burdens on them and use guilt to manipulate them. The parenting in these stories suck with mothers who may simply be mentally ill. There is precocious sexual exploration and damage. There’s this sameness that made the stories run together.

Then there is “The Empty the Empty the Empty” which made me physically ill. I put the book away and binge-watched TV because I could not stomach reading for several days. It’s a story of children sexually assaulting children in 4th grade. There is a lot of inappropriate and bizarre sexual exploration by the children in these stories and even with parents, one mother checking her daughter’s vagina to make sure she’s still a virgin. I don’t recall my friends and I checking each other’s genitals but it happens in several of the stories. I almost quit reading after “The Empty the Empty the Empty” and I might be a happier reader if I had. No story was as awful as that, but the dreadful sameness of the stories made me see them as possibly autobiographical, as though she has one story to tell over and over. I hope she continues to write, but I hope she leaves childhood behind.

Sour Heart will be released on August 1st. I received an e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.

If I had been asked to write a review right after reading the first story in Sour Heart, my review would have been completely different. I thoroughly enjoyed Sour Heart and I was excited to read fiction in an area that I had never really read about before. However, it quickly became apparent though why We Love Crispina was the first story: it was the strongest and the editor knew that it would be lost if it was placed anywhere else in this book. From there it quickly felt like the book was going down hill, the language became crude and sexual. This wasn't something that frustrated me, but combined with the lack of flow in the language it became difficult to read. What did frustrate me, was that there was no distinction in the voices of the narrator from story to story. In fact, you could have told me that it was the same girl at different points in her life and I would have believed you.

I finally decided that the only way I was going to finish this book was to put it down and come back to it and read certain stories at specific points. I wish this book could have just focused on Christina, I could have read an entire novel about her and her family.

…back in those days, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment so subpar that we woke up with flattened cockroaches in our bedsheets, sometimes three or four stuck on our elbows, and once I found fourteen of them pressed to my calves, and there was no beauty in shaking them off, though we strove for grace, swinging our arms in the air as if we were ballerinas.

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang is a raw, unbounded look at the coming-of-age for minority girls in New York. The narrative focuses mainly on a Chinese American family and their relatives, friends and acquaintances. Zhang is uninhibited in her examination of what it means to be the daughter of immigrant parents; how that experience shapes your worldview and attempts to define your life.

“What makes you happy makes Mommy happy,” she would always say to me, sometimes in Chinese, which I wasn’t so good at, but I tried for her and for my father, and when I couldn’t, I would answer them in English, which I also wasn’t so good at, but it was understood that while I could still improve in either language, my parents could not, they were on a road to nowhere, the wall was right up against them, so it was up to me to get really good, it was up to me to shine and that scared me because I wanted to stay behind with them, I didn’t want to go any farther than they could go.

Written as a collection of short stories, the characters and experiences become so interwoven that it is almost unnecessary to tease them apart to find the separate beginning or ending. Throughout, we learn about the struggle of the parents to survive in America. Living with relatives ten to a bed, stealing and dumpster diving are just a few of the experiences that highlight their extreme poverty from which a sense of desperation, frugality and, surprisingly, hope is born.

I knew in the very fuzzy part of what I paid attention to that my parents had suffered, too, they had struggled, too, and whatever happened to them in the year before I was brought to America was somehow related to their refusal to ever order beverages at restaurants because paying an extra dollar or two for something they could get in bulk for cheaper activated some kind of trauma inside them.

However, for their daughter’s these sufferings are just a garish reminder of their otherness. They certainly love their parents, with a sense of obligation born of tradition, but they cannot help to reject them and to strive to be better, to do differently.

But now I wanted to be free. I wanted to be free to be selfish and self-destructive and indulgent like the white girls at the high school my parents worked so hard to get me into, and once they did, once we moved into a neighborhood where no one hung out on the streets, where everyone was the same pasty shade of consumptive blotchy paleness, all it did was make me want to get away from my family. I envied white girls whose relationships with their parents were so abysmal that they could never disappoint them. I wanted white parents who didn’t care where I went or what I did, parents who encouraged me to leave home instead of guilting me into staying their kid forever..

Zhang does an admirable job balancing this storyline with another important one. In what is likely to be her trademark style, she write scenes that are gritty and graphic, exploring the unbridled sexual maturity of girls. The urgency to know our body, to understand these changes is intensified by the pack like nature of their impoverished communities- the close proximity forces this development always into your field of vision.

I was actually looking forward to learning something, but all we ended up doing on the first day was sit around in a circle looking at diagrams of girls’ bodies at various stages of development from no boobs to tiny nubs to big fat round globes, and then somehow got into a long conversation about what sort of touch was appropriate and what was inappropriate. The whole thing was as foreign to me as a house free of Frangie. I mean, all touch was wonderful and the small amount I had experienced in my life was too precious to split off into categories of “wanted” and “unwanted.” And what if we wanted more touch? I felt like asking but never did.

As the story moves along, it becomes clear that the effort of life has embittered our narrators- souring their hearts to their past and the possibility of the future. In this honest debut, Zhang is not afraid to shock nor is she ashamed of the story Sour Heart is telling.

I want to move on, but to what? To where? Most days I can’t imagine a tomorrow until it’s already yesterday. Am I supposed to just keep waiting? Why did you create life? Is it so wrong to wish you had never made me or my mother or my father or their mothers and fathers and all the mothers and fathers who came before them? All I’ve ever known about any of them is how much pain they went through …and I’m just supposed to go through it too? Well, forgive me if I don’t fucking feel like it. If I don’t want to be a story my children rant about to their children when I’m dead. Forgive me. Fucking forgive me. Goodnight.