The Martinicans and the Trinidadians were the kind of people who acted like their homeland would always form a small, missing, and necessary bone in their bodies that caused them ghostly aches for as long as they were alive and away from home, and it bothered me how they clung to their pasts and acted like bygone times were better than what was happening in the here and now. Each story is told from the perspective of a different girl who has migrated from China (or Taiwan) to America with her parents. The stories have parallels and links but they each have their own voice. It felt like Zhang was deliberately pulling away from the stereotypes of demure, polite Asian women. Yet another book that uses poverty porn and then taboo sexuality in the place of good writing. I didn't like this collection for 150 pages and then I REALLY liked two stories and then I felt very mediocre about the ending one. They don't feel quite like "run-on" sentences, they feel more like meandering streams of consciousness. 3.5 stars. Sold by 727Wireless and ships from Amazon Fulfillment. . Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. This book is such a tricky one to rate. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, No Import Fees Deposit & $15.00 Shipping to Italy. Definitely not a book for everyone, but I quite enjoyed this collection of interconnected short stories about second generation Chinese American girls and young women. I have also never seen "run-on" sentences work so well. I bought a new book, but the back cover was ripped halfway through when I received it. Zhang portrays these girls and their families in a light that reveals their vulnerability, darkness and flaws. Unable to add item to List. Jenny Zhang’s characters and scenic precision stand out in her debut collection of short stories, Sour Heart: Stories, a book that illuminates the lives of six young Chinese immigrant girls wrestling with what defines their history, family, womanhood, friendships, and themselves. . especially relevant right now . It feels apt there’s a luminous diagram of a heart on the cover of this book of short stories since it’s a collection which brims over with emotional tales of family life. A short story collection depicting the lives of Asian immigrants in New York living under particularly brutal circumstances - the stories are pretty graphic, and it was hard to read some of the brutality and violence, but Zhang's writing is unique and she delivers sheer deadpan humor that cuts through the grittiness of it all. The men on our block liked to stare at my mom whenever she walked past--fixed, long, concentrated gazes. Sorry Jenny, maybe we'll get along better next time. Zhang’s debut story collection, Sour Heart, comprises seven narratives that can fairly be categorized as coming-of-age tales, but which transcend any notion you might have of what that even means, courtesy of Zhang’s singular voice. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free. It’s rare to read such a thorough and honest account about the Chinese America diaspora of this generation. She demands that they love her to an extreme. Refresh and try again. We work hard to protect your security and privacy. by Lenny. Jenny Zhang writes about immigrants struggling to survive in New York, yes, but it's almost always from the perspective of the children. Eventually though, I came to admire them greatly, especially the women because they had such enviable asses, which caused their belts to dip into a stretched-out V right at the spot where their cheeks met, and I used to follow that V with my eyes and so did the men, who apparently never got bored of seeing it either. There is a grandmother who feels the only worthy thing in life is being a mother, so attempts to become the mother to her grandchildren, confabulating about the days when she breastfed them. We’d love your help. It’s really the rape of Nanking!” as if yelling out the name of a terrible war crime had the ability to scare me when I was nine and had been loved my entire life by parents who vowed daily to spend their whole lives protecting me, and though in 1992 it was true that I was a small, unexceptional thing, one thing I never was was scared. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Interior Chinatown (Vintage Contemporaries), “[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.”. Jenny Zhang writes about immigrants struggling to survive in New York, yes, but it's almost always from the perspective of the children. Search. Mememememememe.”, “I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay.”, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Nominee (2018), Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (2017), Anticipated Literary Reads For Readers of Color 2017, Goodreads Picks for Tournament of Books 2018. It may have been my personal lack of familiarity with this topic that made the book hard to read. Lots I liked and lots I disliked about this collection of linked short stories. I decided to give Leny/Lena Dunham a second chance and began the book with positive expectations, but with a first story that vividly depicts two girls forcing a boy to rape another 4th grade girl after tying her to their bed (with no sense of remorse, just "we're young children exploring our sexuality! It was so hard to keep track of every detail, like how my parents shared the same pair of dress shoes, alternating their schedules so my father could wear them during the day and my mother at night even though they were four sizes too big for her and that was why she tripped so often and had so many scrapes on her body. In “Sour Heart,” author Jenny Zhang tackles the complicated subject of growing up Chinese in America through a loosely linked collection of short stories. Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2017. Still reading this... stories of Chinese immigrants in 1990’s New York. Please try again. Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2018. Sour Heart is one of those rare books that is both tough to get into, and tough to get out of. . Please try again. These protagonists often have a mean streak, and I'm glad Zhang does not shy away from the dark underbelly of their personalities. A frank, sometimes violent, but always engaging collection of short stories, Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart shows how immigrant life in 1990's New York impacted growing up, feeling at home, and family. The writing is approachable but elusive and it will move you in many different ways... and it's just detailed enough to arouse your imagination without getting lost in the weeds. Perhaps the highest praise I can give this collection (which reads more as a novel) is that as a confused and angsty second generation Chinese American, I felt, after reading this, more connected to both my parents and my people. A couple of them confronted my father one evening to set the record straight that they weren’t Dominicans. Sour Heart is a fractured bildungsroman, a gallery of alternate selves, and there’s a progression to the stories, all of which are told by daughters … The portrayal of these characters and their lives felt gratuitous and unsympathetic. “If your teacher asks you to show work, then show the work. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 26, 2017, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2018. I still can not tell if the atrocities decribed in the book in that way and that detail are there for authenticity or purely for the shock value. The first publication from Lena Dunham’s Random House imprint Lenny, Sour Heart is a brilliant, moving portrayal of the struggles of Chinese girls coming of age in America. Submit featured content to piaephotos@gmail.com [(Christina has to move back to Shanghai in order to be raised well since her parental climate is heck, but she doesn't want to leave the parents she loves so much), [(vaginal fingering and a really graphic rape scene where Lucy's BFF, Francine, has Lucy's boyfriend Jason have sex with Frangie, a girl that Lucy's family has taken in that she hates), [, especially because the family was united and actually confident in their bond despite the uncle moving away to get a master’s degree. Buy a cheap copy of Sour Heart book by Jenny Zhang. Looking forward to more of Jenny Zhang. Mande’s feelings of letting go of fantasy to get her mother back were heartbreaking and necessary. I liked the breathlessness of the prose and the run-on sentences but could not get on-board with the plot or the characters. Create lists, bibliographies and reviews: or Search WorldCat. [That ending, where Stacey goes back in time to tell the reader about seeing her grandmother sleepwalking, bouncing on a trampoline, and apologizing to her family, was heartbreaking and definitely showed how past regrets can manifest in the present. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! Original and surprising short stories. DETAIL Author : Jenny Zhangq Pages : 320 pagesq Publisher : Lenny 2017-08-01q Language : Englishq ISBN-10 : 0399589384q ISBN-13 : 9780399589386q Description none Sour Heart: Stories 3. These are stories that show how the horrors of a generation (the Chinese in 1960's China) affect future generations of children (American-Chinese growing up in NYC in the 1990s.). There are other common elements that run through the stories; mother-daughter relationships that are strong but also twisted and somewhat dysfunctional; grief over dashed hopes; a sense of overwhelming odds stacked against the characters; and at the same time, a sense of resilience and spiritedness. There are other common elements that run throu. This collection of short stories is organised around an extremely interesting and original idea: each story is narrated by a child that is connected to the children (and adults) in the other stories through their families having shared a bedroom in the first difficult months after moving from China to the US. Being someone is terrifying. in spite of that, i want to push back against critiques surrounding its vulgarity, which i've seen a lot of in the reviews section for, “We Love You Crispina” (= first 13%): I enjoyed this story about the string of awful hovels a family of Chinese immigrants is forced to move between in early 1990s New York City. Some parents drink excessively, others work such long hours such that they almost never see their children, while others cannot get enough of their children and are by their si, An intense collection of stories, each one told from the perspective of a young girl living in NYC in the 1990s with parents who had immigrated from Shanghai. I just forgot to say it.” It embarrassed me whenever my mom or my dad trumped me (although it was never on purpose) with how thoughtful they were, and by comparison, how thoughtless and selfish I had been in only thinking of myself when it seemed like every second of every day my parents were planning to undergo yet another sacrifice to make our lives that much better, and no matter how diligently I tried to keep up, there was always so much that was indiscernible. Sour Heart is a hard one to rate. Mrs. Lancaster can go suck it. 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. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Sometimes, I would forget what I was supposed to say after she said something like that and I would say the wrong thing, like, “And what makes me happy is eating ice cream. Zhang captures the confusion and angst of second generation Chinese Americans seemingly doomed to an unrepayable debt to parents who, in numerous instances, lived through/escaped unspeakable trauma during the Cultural Revolution (losing/leaving behind innumerable family members in the process) and worked/sacrificed endlessly upon arrival in America only to see their children slowly abandon and even become embarrassed by their heritage, their language, and their customs. . "), I wasn't exactly thrilled. When I saw this book was included in the LENNY imprint, associated with Lena Dunham, it made perfect sense to me. Sour Heart is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the 90s. She is able to embellish in a way that does not feel frivolous and I found that even the details and tangents that she explored contributed positively to my reading experience and understanding of the stories. Exquisitely beautiful . Start by marking “Sour Heart” as Want to Read: Error rating book. The way she writes about the violence of children made me uncomfortable, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. . Full disclosure: I didn't finish this book. She’s a tool, Mom.” “Sour girl,” my mom said. We’re West Indians, they said. Incisive and beautiful. 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. Zhang, Jenny, author. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. i was enticed by the first page, and decided to purchase a copy. Welcome back. The stories demonstrate the manifestations and aftermath of the trauma experienced by the parents in Mao era China and the varying coping mechanisms they utilize. Please try your request again later. This is an interesting collection of stories. 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... Free Shipping on all orders over $10. Buy Sour Heart: Stories by Zhang, Jenny (ISBN: 9780399589386) from Amazon's Book Store. York City in the United States on November 25, 2018... stories Chinese! N'T feel quite like `` run-on '' sentences, they feel more like meandering streams of consciousness 15 2019. Streams of consciousness about this collection of linked short stories address below and don... Also never seen `` run-on '' sentences work so well, with the arrival.... Through the eyes of their personalities car on the Chinese immigrants in the.... 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