Jenny Zhang

"A debut collection of stories that plunge readers into the tender and chaotic hearts of adolescent girls growing up in New York City, from celebrated poet and National Magazine Award nominee Jenny Zhang"--

Stories

Sour Heart

azliana aziz

i am torn between 3 or 4 so in the end it's 3.8

love Zhang's sharp, playful tone but personally i felt something quite disconnecting with some of the stories that i had to slog through them. the intended? similarities between them also did not help. 
what's striking and admirable were the experiences of people who leave and left behind were given equal spotlight as oftentimes, book about immigrant's experiences were told almost exclusively from the lens of them who left.

Karis Ryu

Jeremy Wang

a very raw book about longing and unbelonging. i like that jenny portrays a (nontrivial! and meaningful!) variety of immigrant experiences even as she elaborates on their commonalities. obviously i’m a sucker for stories revolving around familial sacrifice, especially in an intense east asian way, but these stories were really uniquely powerful, even while they didn’t venture beyond the well-trodden archetypes. 

it probably has a bit to do with how far jenny pushes her characters; i won’t go as far as saying that they’re caricatured, but i do think they sometimes (especially nainai and a-ling) feel more like thought experiments than like people. it’s refreshingly tart though!

A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City—for readers of Zadie Smith and Helen Oyeyemi. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction • Finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • NPR • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Guardian • Esquire • New York • BuzzFeed A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy’s Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again. Praise for Sour Heart “[Jenny Zhang’s] coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that’s rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy.”—USA Today “One of the knockout fiction debuts of the year.”—New York “Compelling writing about what it means to be a teenager . . . It’s brilliant, it’s dark, but it’s also humorous and filled with love.”—Isaac Fitzgerald, Today “[A] combustible collection . . . in a class of its own.”—Booklist (starred review) “Gorgeous and grotesque . . . [a] tremendous debut.”—Slate

alexandra

one of my favorite books of the year and all-time :sob: i can't wait to reread

Maddie

Gut-wrenching and beautiful stories. Highly recommend!

Alexandra Sklar

jiaqi kang

Ummm as usual jenny zhang makes me want to wipe myself off the face of this earth.... i am in Agony & i am queasy and kinda wanna die .... i have never encountered another writer with such raw, relentless honesty! Children are the most precious things in this world and they need to be protected and cherished at all costs

Kyra Ann Dawkins

First and foremost, I want to preface this by saying that if this review were solely on based writing quality, it would be a clear 5 stars for me. But another part of reviewing a text is honoring personal preferences and coming to embrace what I enjoy as a reader. Sour Heart is one of the most compelling and engaging short story collections that I've read in a long time, but there were elements of the tone and style that placed me in uncanny valley.

 The narration throughout the stories came from the perspectives of children/young adults that know way too much and nothing at all, which made processing the depicted events a bit destabilizing. Also, because there were so many details to contextualize the scenes, it was hard to comb through which ones were pertinent to the plot and which ones were there more for imagery's sake. While trying to navigate which details were important, I often felt like I stumbled into reading somewhat graphic scenes that I could no longer opt out of imagining. On the one hand, when those kinds of scenes happen in the real world, people usually don't have the choice over whether or not they are exposed to them. They are swallowed by the reality of it. That's how this book made me feel, which is an incredible feat in writing. As a reader, I like being able to choose my distance from the scene, and Sour Heart is unapologetically in your face. If you like being completely immersed, Sour Heart is for you.

Sour Heart Stories

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