The House on Mango Street

Author: Sandra Ciscernos
Genre: Fiction, Coming-Of-Age
Publisher: San Val, Incorporated, 1999
Pages: 110
My Rating: Highly Recommend.

The House on Mango Street is literary genius.

Synopsis: The House on Mango Street, which appeared in 1983, is a linked collection of forty-four short tales that evoke the circumstances and conditions of a Hispanic American ghetto in Chicago. The narrative is seen through the eyes of Esperanza Cordero, an adolescent girl coming of age. These concise and poetic tales also offer snapshots of the roles of women in this society. They uncover the dual forces that pull Esperanza to stay rooted in her cultural traditions on the one hand, and those that compel her to pursue a better way of life outside the barrio on the other. Throughout the book Sandra Cisneros explores themes of cultural tradition, gender roles, and coming of age in a binary society that struggles to hang onto its collective past while integrating itself into the American cultural landscape. Cisneros wrote the vignettes while struggling with her identity as an author at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in the 1970s. She was influenced by Russian-born novelist and poet Vladimir Nabokov's memoirs and by her own experiences as a child in the Chicago barrio. This engaging book has brought the author critical acclaim and a 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award. Specifically, it has been highly lauded for its impressionistic, poetic style and powerful imagery. Though Cisneros is a young writer and her work is not plentiful, The House on Mango Street establishes her as a major figure in American literature. Her work has already been the subject of numerous scholarly studies and is often at the forefront of works that explore the role of Latinas in American society.

Review: This book is literary genius. It's a vignette of Esperanza Cordero's life in Chicago. I'd been wanting to read this for awhile now and was expecting a traditional novel. It's not. It's better. I loved it, but it did take some time to get into the "vignette" format. It's a book that isn't meant to just be read, it's also meant to be appreciated. It reads fast as each chapter is only 2 to 3 pages long.

With that said, I realized that this is typically a book assigned to students in 7th to 12th grades and it surprised me. This is just the type of book teachers love to assign because, at best, it pushes their students to think and develop an understanding of fiction as art. However, the flip side is that it also frustrates them and leaves them feeling incompetent (I'm having flashbacks to reading Mark Twain and William Faulkner in high school).

Only an adult can fully appreciate all that The House on Mango Street has to offer.