#7: The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

This novella is a collection of vignettes told from the perspective of Esperanza, a young woman just entering puberty who lives in the Latino section of Chicago. Each vignette is independent from the one before. Told in relatively chronological order, Esperanza’s perceptions are initially naïve and accepting of the world, even though she’s aware from the start of her social status. As the book continues, however, she becomes more and more aware of the difficulties and differences caused by her race, especially the sexual dangers. By the end of the book, aided by unpleasant experiences, she comes to find her life and environment suffocating, and uses her writing to escape from it.

The book doesn’t have a plot, particularly, but is instead about Esperanza’s impressions and perceptions of the world, and how she deals with them. I wish this was something I’d been assigned to read in middle school, or early in high school. I would have gotten a lot more out of it than the books about boys and sports and boys and their parents.

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

That's good to hear; it's been popular in developmental writing courses at the university I did my MA at last year, and I'm always worried about their choices (there's a bias toward assigning books that lit profs think are "good for you" rather than ones that students will actually enjoy or get anything out of). For example, while reviewers and others raved about _The Kite Runner_ (partly set locally), and from the bits I read of it, it was very well written, students just found it miserable to read.