The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros

Review By: Shelby

A book we had to read for school. This book is SOOOO great. It's got to be one of my favorite books and also on the list of my favorite school-required books.

Anyway this book is a collection of little narrations that Mr. Humanities calls Vignettes. It's about Esperanza, a girl who grows up in a barrio in Chicago. She doesn't want to belong there because she doesn't want to be restricted just because she is a woman and because she's Latina. She wants to escape her little house on Mango Street, but she is destined to leave and return to her roots.

The story has a lot of symbols and motifs. Like names, windows... etc. All the women always hang out of windows because their dads or husbands don't let them leave the house (because they are male chauvanist pendejos) and that's their only way to communicate with the outside world. Esperanza doesn't want to be like them, so she tries to ignore all boys and be independent but she's growing up and starts liking boys so she has a little trouble with that. um... anyway.

This book is great...it has a great style of writing and it has classicaly powerful themes in it like gender roles and self-identity and determination. And it'll take you like a day to read it. So you'd better.