The House On Mango Street

The House On Mango Street

By Sandra Cisneros

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The House On Mango Street is the story of a Hispanic girl named Esperanza. It is a story of Esperanza and her friends, family and her neighborhood. It is a story about how she lived from childhood to maturity. The story starts with Esperanza talking about how they moved a lot and always have rent houses and how this house on Mango Street is the first house they have not rented. The story continues, with the first five or six chapters being mainly about the characters and the setting, their house and neighborhood. How does the story end? Well, just read it for yourself and find out!!

The House On Mango Street is written mostly formal but here and there it is informal because the novel is in first-person and it is told by a young girl. Esperanza sometimes talks in an informal way. The theme of The House On Mango Street is that home will only be where family is. This is the theme because later in the book when Esperanza is older, she gets sexually assaulted. This solidifies her desire to leave Mango Street (which starts earlier in the book) but she realizes that if she leaves Mango Street she has to come back to help the woman she left and the family she left. The characters are richly developed as the story progresses. As Esperanza grows, she matures a lot. She starts to take interest in boys and by the end of the book she has matured greatly and is very wise. Also, another theme in The House On Mango Street is that making the most wise and best decision is always the best. This is because when Esperanza makes the decision of not leaving Mango Street, that is the best because now she decides that she can become a writer and that will help her with her problems. There is also little conflict in the story anbd wherever the is conflict it is mostly person vs. self.

The House On Mango Street is easy read. The chapters are really small, sometimes a half a page. The word choice of the author is really simple as well. There are some quotations when it comes to dialouge but mostly it is just the sentence and then which character said it. It is told from first person point of view. The genre of the book is cultural and it is a work of fiction. It has 144 pages in paperback form.

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Her father was Spanish-speaking and her mother was English-speaking of Mexican decent. She was the third child of seven children and the only girl. When Sandra Cisneros was eleven, her family moved to a Puerto Rican neighborhood. This was her inspiration for her book The House On Mango Street. Sandra Cisneros was awarded the Bachelor of Arts degree at Loyola University in Chicago. Sandra Cisneros currently lives in San Antonio. She lives alone and is not married. When a reporter asked why she has not married, she replied that she has never seen marriage as happy as living alone and that her child is her writing and she doesn't want anything to come between that.

I would give this book maybe three stars out of five. That is because the writing style was very different to me and I have never seen it before. Also, I didn't like her idea of not using quotation marks when there was dialogue and I really didn't see the point of its use. This got me confused numerous times and it started to get annoying. Also, there seemed to be little conflict taking place in the entire story.