MANGO MANGO

    For my final blog post, I chose to read The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. The short book is a collection of vignettes (basically a bunch of short accounts about various things) telling the story of a young girl named Esperanza who lives on Mango Street in a predominantly Hispanic part of Chicago. Esperanza is embarassed of and does not want to belong in her rundown neighborhood, and has dreams of leaving and living in a better place, and belonging there instead. Esperanza is a young girl who must face many challenges as she creates for herself what she will become.

    The vignettes help to describe the characters in Esperanza's life, as well as the main character's beliefs and life experiences.

    There were a number of things that jumped out and shocked me a little bit about this book. There are a number of times that Esperanza spontaneously talks about things like adults forcing her into a kiss, or a friend being abused by a parent or husband, and then usually proceeds to make little to no comments about how she feels about the events.

    I personally didn't like the book very much, since the plot was confusing and seemingly went nowhere. There wasn't any actual character development, as Esperanza and everyone else in the story seemed to have static beliefs and personalities from beginning to end. The whole book kind of seemed like a long introduction, where the characters were introduced and I could come to understand the main character's status quo, but there was very little plot development. Thank you for reading this blog post!

    - Quintus