house on mango street

One of the cute MMs recommended that I read House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. This MM had to read it for her high school summer reading, and I was interested to learn why it was a required reading. It seems like the English reading requirements have changed a lot since I graduated from high school.

This book is a really quick read; I think I read it in less than two hours. The book is comprised of a bunch of vignettes, written from the perspective of a teenage girl in inner-city Chicago. Cisneros is a really creative writer who uses poignant description and interesting word combinations. The flow of this book is also interesting too, since she doesn't use any quotation marks when people speak.

I really liked the 25th anniversary edition that I read, because it contains an introduction by Cisneros that was written in 2008. Cisneros reminisces about her experience writing House in the 1980s. I especially liked her discussion of how each vignette would end. She said that "the stories always insist on telling me where they want to end. They often surprise me by stopping when I had every intention of galloping along a little further. They're subborn. They know best when there's no more to be said. The last sentence must ring like the final notes at the end of a marachi song - tan tán - to tell you when the song is done." (Second Vintage Contemporaries Edition, 2009, p. xxii).

If anyone is looking for a quick and easy read, I'd suggest this book. Has anyone else read it? Were you required to read this book in high school?