The House on Mango Street

I’m sure this is to my discredit, but I just didn’t get this. To be fair, I thought it was autobiographical when I ordered it, and it turns out to be fictional. But the way it is written just doesn’t work for me.

A very quick but a very compelling read - I absolutely loved the use of vignettes throughout the book, and I honestly couldn't put it down. Evocative, beautifully written and a very important look at the intersection of ethnicity and class in American fiction.

Although I was looking forward to reading this book, I have to say, I’m disappointed. No story line. More like poetry. Not very captivating. Maybe I didn’t read the overview well. Would have liked it to be a story . Short non related pieces of poetry about things a young girl saw or experienced while lining in a Latino community. The short disconnected pieces of poetry could have been a good story, but instead were too short to really get you interested. I was fooled by the wrote up on the cover. Someone really wanted this book to get published. The vignettes were so short and in poetry that none were touching or heartbreaking. Not a good book at all. So disconnected and random.

I was surprised I had never read The House on Mango Street since it has been on so many required reading lists! Told from the point of view of a young girl, in short vignettes, is an interesting way to learn about her world. If you haven’t read it, add it to your list and if you haven’t read it since you were a kid, reread it! The stories will be a little different this time, your point of view as an adult will look at her stories differently! Esperanza is a young Latina girl growing up on Chicago. At only 110 pages she expresses happiness and sadness. But she really writes about what freedom means to her and what feeling oppressed is like. 🏡 If you have ever watched the show Jane the Virgin, she is a young Latina writer and I can see some comparisons from the book. Then in season 4 she actually talks about this book and other strong Latina female writers. That is when it reminded me, I needed to read this!

The House on Mango Street is an novella holding a beautiful story of a unique girl told in an intriguing way. The book breaks from standard storytelling procedures and instead tells the story of a young girl, Esperanza, growing up on Mango Street by way of short vignettes. Some heartwarming, some terrifying, these vignettes tell the story of a girl trying to discover who she is and how to live in the world around her. One major struggle seen throughout the novella is that of self-definition, as every decision Esperanza makes is underscored by her struggle to define herself. In the beginning of the novel, she desperately tries to escape the identity that has been given to her by her family; she wishes she could “baptize herself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees.” Because Esperanza doesn’t even know who she herself is yet, she tries to forge an identity for herself from everything that she thinks she should be like. One such attempt is her pursuit to try to be like Sally, “the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke.” However, she soon finds that she is not Sally, and she can’t force herself to be more like her. Ultimately, the subsequent journey of acceptance throughout the novella leads her to discovering how to define herself. She learns to accept where she is from, and even though she knows that “one day [she] will go away,” she will always be the girl from the house on Mango Street. From her struggle of self-definition to many other issues she faces in the book, Esperanza is a strong and complex heroin to this strong and complex novella. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novella, and I give it four out of five stars. I thought it was a great read, but it did not deeply move me in the way a five star book would.