#15: Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Like The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collection of short stories. Unlike The House on Mango Street, however, the stories are not all about the same person. A few could be the same woman at different stages of her life (I only recall one story with a male narrator) but they all appear to be different narrators.

Some stories are about a few minutes, some about a day, and others about an entire lifetime. As with The House on Mango Street, it isn’t so much what happens in the stories that’s important as it is the sense of self that the narrators have, and the impact their lives have on them. Together, they form an interesting and varied representation of the lives of Hispanics on the Texas-Mexico border.

One thing I might need to warn about is that Cisneros does include Spanish words and phrases without translation, including one story that’s actually a collection of letters, with several letters in nothing but Spanish. I can’t speak Spanish to save my life (ok, I can, but it insults the ears of those who know the language) but am familiar with the syntax habit, and can understand the language enough to figure out what they’re talking about. People not familiar with the language might have a more difficult time with those bits.