Prelude

Hello again, bookworms! I decided to take a detour into the coming-of-age genre for this one, specifically The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. There’s a lot packed into the smattering of vignettes that this book is, so I won’t stretch this intro any longer. This is a review with spoilers, so be warned. Diving into this classic starts… now.

Plot

I’ll try to make it short, because it’s not what I’d call an insane plot, but a very meaningful one. I’ll leave the breakdown to my overall thoughts.

It starts with a tiny red house on Mango Street, with the girl Esperanza being there after having moved… several times. Followed by small vignettes about various micro-aspects of her family life, such as her name, hair of her family members, how she feels about her little sister Nenny, or her friend for a week Cathy (also the queen of cats). Importantly, Esperanza and her sisters receive a bag of shoes, which includes multiple pairs of high heels. Starting with Rachel, they come to enjoy the feeling of womanhood and anticipate the attention from boys. But when a drunk man tries to kiss Rachel, they immediately notice the danger of their attention and put the shoes away. At a church, Esperanza dances only in her ordinary shoes with her uncle, but yet focuses on the stare of a boy who watched her dance. And at work, she is forcibly kissed by a man who lures her with a conversation. Her aunt who listens to her poetry and stories despite slowly dying and becoming blind dies while she and her friends insensitively imitate her. She then meets Ruthie, a woman with potential outside of Mango Street who nonetheless stays there, trapped by her husband despite her desire to leave. Esperanza finds solace in trees just like her, who grew amongst concrete and reach as high as they can while distancing herself from her Spanish heritage. Majorly, she proceeds to meet a beautiful girl named Sally who is abused and locked at home by her father because of her beauty. Her propensity to be with other boys leads her to ditch Esperanza with a boy, where she proceeds to be raped by a group of men, misled by the glamorized images of sex that Sally filled her with. Finally, the aunts of Lucy and Rachel tell her fortune, informing her that Mango Street will always be part of her and that she will come back to it.

Importantly, Esperanza plans to come back for the ones that have no way out of Mango Street; the ones she leaves behind.

Overall Thoughts

Before I even get to the themes and characters of the novel, I’d first like to praise the structure of the book itself. I love books with a non-linear structure like the one in Mango Street, since it makes the overall plot and reading experience more interesting. Here, though, it’s many disconnected scenes, and you don’t know when they are. Yet, these mini-stories all tie together, but not into one cohesive and complete puzzle. It’s more like many different puzzles that share common themes and elements. The reader’s job is to find the threads connecting these puzzles, and it’s one of my favorite elements of the novel. The following three puzzles are my favorites, but there are many more, so please do a reread if you’ve already read it!

Discovery of Identity

What I love about how Esperanza discovers her identity is that she doesn’t proceed by her discovering a new part of herself (although she does do so), but by shifting the way she thinks about her identity and setting. Instead of constantly desiring that Mango Street wasn’t part of her, she accepts that it is a part of who she is even after she leaves it. Her working-class background and Chicana heritage will never leave her either, which is what the community of Mango Street is meant to represent. Her discovery of her womanhood is also crafted through her connections with others and not by herself, through characters who face the wrath of patriarchy in their lives and sisters who experiment with what it feels like to transition from girlhood to womanhood. Esperanza does not choose to embrace her femininity, but aims to have more agency and independence in her life, like the men she has seen have.

Female Entrapment

Another thing I love about this book is that female oppression is explored in multiple different ways; it does not just repeat insights of the same situation.

  • Sally is beaten and abused by her father, and then proceeds to let herself be taken advantage of by boys when she embraces her female beauty.
  • Ruthie wanted to pursue greater things than what she is at the present moment, but waits to leave Mango Street until her husband does so due to societal standards, which has not happened yet.
  • Marin is waiting on the pieces to fall together for her in order to leave Mango Street. It’s different than Ruthie’s case because patriarchy is internalized within her, squashing any initiative that she may have to seek her own path.
  • Rachel embracing her newfound womanhood with the heels in the bag, but is immediately confronted with unwanted attention from other men. These are just some examples, but the multifaceted look at women’s oppression is great and refreshing to see in a fictional story such as this one. Also, what happens to Esperanza when Sally leaves her alone… I don’t want to say it here, but it was something I wasn’t expecting. Perfect way to capture how sudden and scary assault is for women (the possibility of it too). Thematically, one of my favorite parts of the novel. Chef’s kiss.

Belonging

The best example of the lack of this one is Marin, who is waiting for someone or something to come along and carve her path for her. Because she has difficulty with finding belonging and, by extension, her own identity, she needs someone else to bring it to her. Esperanza knows that she belongs outside of Mango Street, but has difficulty realizing that it is part of who she is, even if it might not be the right place for her. It manifests in how she prefers English over Spanish or having her dream home be a polar opposite of her family’s tiny house on Mango Street.

Marin is only capable of hope and longing, while Esperanza has the power to belong, but that place lies outside of where she currently is.

Final Thoughts

What I adore about this book is how much depth and rich character is communicated in just 44 short vignettes, and it’s very realistic. There aren’t an excessive amount of characters, and the ones that are prominent are very well-developed and fleshed out, especially Sally and Esperanza. As people, we don’t see most people that often or ever again, and this book knows that. Therefore, the choice to not develop Marin or Ruthie (for example) is a positive. I could not afford to give this book any less than the 5/5 it deserves as a classic. It’s approachable, but it is not at all a beach read. Give it a standing ovation.