This is a classic I never got around to before. It’s deceptively short–I was surprised, honestly, by how easy it was to read. But it has stayed with me since I finished–there’s power in these hundred pages. Those hundred pages contain 2 or 3-page vignettes told by Esperanza, a 12-year-old Mexican-American girl growing up in a Latino section of Chicago. It’s 100 pages of details, told in vibrant images, and the vignettes are only loosely connected. The stories individually are simple enough, a little abstract sometimes, […]
No Place Like Home
The House on Mango Street is a short novel about a year in the life of a Mexican American adolescent named Esperanza. She and her family (parents, two older brothers and a younger sister named Nenny) have moved into a house of their own in Chicago for the first time. In a series of vignettes, Cisneros paints a deeply moving picture, or series of pictures, of life on Mango Street and of Esperanza’s hopes and fears. Cisneros’ background as a poet comes through in her […]