Zhang’s writing strips away the layers between reader and experience; her gaze is unflinching, and she never cuts away when things become uncomfortable or grotesque. The effect is something like watching a wound scar in reverse. It seems to say: This is the site of trauma. I might heal, but I’ll never be the same ... Humiliating, brutal, funny, visceral, and truthful ... Stories matter because every immigrant story is a tale of lucky breaks and narrow escapes. Only in the softer, sepia-toned light of revised history do these stories look like individual cunning and derring-do. Sour Heart is brilliant because it runs headlong into this thicket of contradiction and comes out unscathed. Zhang’s gift is to meld the tender and grotesque—the raw materials of a life—into stories that teach us how to treat each other.

Zhang maintains a deceptive sort of control, moving backward and forward in time, scrolling through memories, lending her stories the quality of rambling monologues and concealing the seams of the exquisite design of the book as a whole, its raucous set pieces, and long, looping sentences. The result is a forceful performance and one of the knockout fiction debuts of the year ... The world of the late 1980s and 1990s — the era’s crappy television shows and computer games and fast food — is something Zhang summons on the page without a false move ... Zhang has transformed her narcissism and nostalgia into that most American of genres, a virtuoso song of herself.

Jenny Zhang’s astounding short-story collection, Sour Heart, combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain ... The collection’s organizing theme is familial love that warps a person beyond all recognition: specifically, a type of immigrant devotion with a power that is both creative and entropic, and which affects its recipients in idiosyncratic ways ... Until now, Zhang has been better known for poetry and essays, but she has a background in fiction and she has a knack for deploying and combining common literary devices for mischievous, unexpected ends.

Sour Heart is about the immigrant experience, but Zhang isn’t out to bash the Good Old U.S. of A. Her coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that’s rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy. Her girls, like so many, are caught in between: different cultures, warring parents. Add assimilation to the bucket of typical teenage woes, and good luck with that. The same families and girls pop in and out of these interconnected tales, all variations on a single theme, which is both a strength and a weakness of Sour Heart.

Amidst this shared indigence exposed in the opening story, Zhang skillfully introduces the kernels of the stories to come ... That Zhang suffuses her young protagonists with autobiographical details – Shanghai-born, immigrant parents, New York-raised, Stanford-educated – adds authenticity to these narratives of strife, growth, and various degrees of success. Beyond the details, however, is a universal shared experience: a longing for home, and the challenges – economic, social, familial, cultural – to finally get there. The topic couldn’t be more timely as immigration debates continue to flare; with unblinking candor, Zhang illuminates the struggles to belong, to settle, to be welcomed home.

Women, young and old, are the focus of Sour Heart. Motherhood; sexuality; matriarchies; the roles of a wife, daughter, and sister; and the misunderstandings that can come from these identities rise up again and again in Zhang’s stories. No two are exactly the same, but all accompany the pressures of growing up in an immigrant family and the history these individuals bring with them ... In her illustration of Chinese immigration in the ’90s, Zhang is often humorous though refrains from lighter tones. The humor in each story is earned in the same way the intensity and depth are—through the strength of each story’s character arc. It is the funny moments of misunderstandings, growth, and relationships that make the girls so real and immensely complex ... Sour Heart is more than a collection of stories worth telling; they’re the sort that rarely get told.

Sour Heart feels a bit like Girls at its best: a profane and sensitive female bildungsroman filtered through several interlaced perspectives ... As a genre, immigrant literature often seems to demand that characters act grateful upon entering the rags-to-riches national pipeline. They can now access the American dream! But Sour Heart sets the 'model minority' myth on fire. I cannot overstate how satisfying it is to hear such maximalist obscenity gushing from Asian American women, who are rarely afforded the luxury of coarseness when they appear in pop culture. It’s not that Zhang’s characters are tough-talking rebellious 'types,' but simply that they’re full of all the humanity that real people possess ... Fiction about the immigrant experience is often fiction about powerlessness—people dropped into foreign contexts and left at the mercy of forces they don’t immediately understand. That’s one reason Zhang’s child’s-eye view succeeds so beautifully: Kids are frequently powerless, too, and characters’ coming-of-age can sync up with the arc of their integration into a new country.

..[a] moving and energetic debut collection ... As is often the case with deftly written child narrators (most of Zhang’s seem to hover around the age of nine), deceptively simple observations are occasions for poignant and difficult personal growth: parents seem human in a new way – their disappointments, personal and professional sacrifices pitted with all too familiar, childlike desire ... Sour Heart hosts a well of emotion, but its critical organs are also intimately linked to the young female body that is hot, sticky, brazen, penetrable. These sensibilities seep into Zhang’s prose, in which interior and exterior collide in narrative jumps, associative imagery and long passages of idiosyncratic dialogue ... Zhang gives life to a chorus of voices rich with reinvention, a narrative genealogy of what it is to be, to speak and to write across many forms of expression at once.

...most of Zhang's situations — and language — are far more violent and sexually explicit than the classic immigrant tale. These girls aren't sheltered. How could they be, when they're sleeping on mattresses on a floor shared by their parents and three other families? They're tough and knowing — and they sound like it — although you can also hear vestiges of a childish vulnerability in their voices ... Most of Zhang's others stories in Sour Heart are simultaneously tough to read and, yet, worth it. There's something very compelling about young girls in fiction, and in life, who speak up — and if their voices are rude, funny, even offensive sometimes, all the better. Given this fierce debut, I'll be giving the other voices Dunham finds a careful listen.

Zhang’s stories start out brittle and unsparing but settle as the girls get older, more educated, more financially secure and further away from 'sleeping ten people to a room.' But even 15-year-old Jenny, poised for Stanford, secure in the suburbs, says of her parents, '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. It really did' ... Sour Heart is joltingly fresh and necessary. She’s a standout choice for first Lenny author, an imprint dedicated to publishing complex female voices.

Zhang is most poignant when she allows herself to escape the confines of the teenage gaze, alluding to epiphanies that will come as these characters age and realize what they owe their parents ... Zhang’s allusions to the complexity of the immigrant experience, the choicelessness of poverty, the diversity of marital relationships, and even the nightmarish fear of outsiders are limited by her consistent use of similar points of view. Graphic, uncomfortable situations sometimes substitute for complicated prose. Though bursting with possibility, these linked stories don’t quite mature.

Taken as a whole, these linked stories illuminate the complexities and contradictions of first-generation life in America. Zhang has a gift for sharp, impactful endings, and a poet’s ear for memorable detail.

Sour Heart never shies from anger, failure, or shit. Zhang’s characters are poor, or recently poor, or terrified of being poor again, and the girl protagonists of all these stories struggle for control over their own feelings and the various obligations of being a daughter in their family ... How brothers and sisters translate, restate, and reimagine for one another is critical to how Sour Heart’s protagonists see themselves. It’s refreshing to see that relationship given weight. Sour Heart goes deep and dark into the private worlds of children, shining a light on how twisted kids can get with imperfect knowledge and a lot of alone time. Zhang has a knack for both relaying pre-adolescent decision-making with clarity and undermining the idea that time softens edges of creepy memories. It leaves the collection with a few nightmarish tales about friendship and power ... Confessional without the shame of confession, the best stories in Sour Heart feel like they are being poured from a girl heart right to your ear. Zhang uses repetition to great effect. Sometimes like a cudgel, sometimes like a small, sharp stone in your hand, repetition makes you feel the psychic weight of certain words and ideas. Coupled with an ear for natural dialogue (and inner monologue), the stories almost beg to be read aloud. But, as spending time immersed in another person’s thoughts can be wearing, it may be best to take a break between the stories of Sour Heart to give the details room to breathe.