THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET
Every summer I try to revisit one book I’ve read and loved before—the only criteria is that it needs to remind me of the blissfully lazy and youthful days of summer break. This year I picked Sandra Cisneros' THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, a vignette-style novel chronicling one year of young Esperanza Cordero’s life as she grows up in Chicago. Reading it during one of my high school summers in Bangkok, I remember being struck by how simply Cisneros was able to depict the joy, fear, awe, and so much more that a young adolescent feels at the cusp of young adulthood. Esperanza, ages 11 through 13, observes her neighborhood filled with immigrants and first-generation Americans. Cisneros writes about the challenges and heartbreaking moments in the lives of those who are othered with such clarity that reading it so many years later still catches me by surprise. The prose, sometimes lyrical, is effortless because she’s just so honest. She never tries to make Esperanza seem any older, smarter, or more interesting than she is—she simply lets her be.
—Nimarta Narang, Digital Fellow
