This book is frequently described as "a series of vignettes", but reading it in 2021, it strikes me how similar the format is to modern blogs. Combined with the lack of quotation marks (which is explained in the Introduction of my edition), the short chapters felt like diary entries to me.
I don't read a lot of poetry, but this book felt like poetry posing as prose. The narrator, Esperanza, writes about her family and her neighborhood, weaving together a tapestry of life with a backdrop of poverty and immigrant experiences. While certainly readable for middle schoolers, The House on Mango Street may be better suited for older, teenaged readers; the writing is deeply emotional and touches upon topics of domestic violence and sexual assault and themes of feminism and self-determination. I followed Esperanza's transition from childhood to adolescence with a sense of both sorrow and hope.
Published in 1984, this book has a bit of outdated language (e.g., "Eskimo", "Oriental") that was widely acceptable in the 1980s but which would be considered inappropriate today. I don't hold these references against the book, in fact, I think it makes this book a good example of how society and sensibilities evolve. Having grown up in the 1980s, I even felt a bit of nostalgia at the mention of photo negatives, and I wonder if some young readers today might not know what they are?
The edition I read included a wonderful Introduction written by the author in 2008 that described the context of who Sandra Cisneros was as a person when she wrote the book, and how the stories and characters came to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment