Book Review: Sour Heart

A collection of short stories centred around one underlying narrative.

Flick through a few pages of Sour Heart and you’ll find a collection of short stories centred around one underlying narrative.

Jenny Zhang provides insight into what life was like for Asian immigrants in the 1990s, offering a real yet at times, disturbing account of their hardships.

Each short story revolves around the same community of immigrants, who trade their lives in China and Taiwan for life on the poverty line in New York City.

A number of narrators recount their stories, all stemming from the similar voice of a young Asian girl, struggling to relate to the alien community around her.

At times, the flow-on sentence structure and constant flipping of interwoven characters can make the storyline hard to follow, but if you keep up, you’ll be rewarded with an insightful yet startling read.

This article was originally published in Fashion Journal 174. You can read it here.